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RICHARD MONACO
Richard Monaco recalls Italian-American life in San Francisco's North Beach
in the 1930s and 1940s.
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San Francisco Public Library
STACKS
REFERENCE BOOK
Not to be taken from the Library
THIS INTERVIEW IS THE PROPERTY OF
TELEGRAPH HILL DWELLERS
NO PORTION OF THIS TRANSCRIPT MAY BE
QUOTED OR REPRODUCED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM:
Office of the President
Telegraph Hill Dwellers
P.O. Box 330159
San Francisco, CA 941 33
All photographs copyright 1985
Richard Monaco
P O. BOX 330159 SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133 • 415.273.1004
. t h d , o r g
Founded in 1954 to perpetuate the historic traditions of San Francisco's Telegraph Hill and to represent the community interests of its residents and property owners.
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2010 with funding from
San Francisco Public Library
http://www.archive.org/details/richardmonacoOOniona
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Name Richard Monaco
Address 38 Via Navarro. Greenbrae. CA 94904
Date of Birth December 27. 1 928 Place of Birth San Francisco
Name
Death
Date and Place of Birth
Date and Place of
GRANDPARENTS:
J.B. Monaco
December 13, 1856
Verscio. Ticino. Switzerland
December 25, 1938
San Francisco
Catherine Battistessa Collinasca. Switzedand
1919
San Francisco
Timothy Callahan
San Francisco
Alice Glehen
1870
San Francisco
1955
San Francisco
PARENTS:
November 11,1 900
Dante Dominick Monaco San Francisco
December 1 975
San Francisco
Edna Louise Callahan
January 27, 1902
San Francisco
1989
San Francisco
SIBLINGS:
Robert
February 20, 1932
San Francisco
1969
San Francisco
SPOUSE:
Date and Place of Birth Date and Place Married
Helen Moncrief
March 1, 1936
Perth. Scotland
September 1961
San Francisco
CHILDREN:
Robert
September 22, 1962
San Francisco
Richard
July 6, 1965
San Francisco
GRANDCHILDREN:
Peyton Monaco
November 30, 2000
San Francisco
Amanda Monaco
September 1 , 2002
San Francisco
PROJECT:
TELEGRAPH HILL DWELLERS ORAL HISTORY
NARRATOR:
Richard Monaco
INTERVIEW DATES: May 1 and July 1 8, 2001
INTERVIEWER:
Audrey Tomaselli
TRANSCRIBER:
Lisa Vogt
EDITORS:
Audrey Tomaselli / June Osterberg
]:
Interviewer's Comments
[In this interview, Rictiard Monaco, the president of Monaco Digital Film Labs
and Video on 9th Street in San Francisco , and the grandson of famed
photographer J.B. Monaco, provides details of the family photography
business including the discovery by Richard in the 1970s of a long lost
treasure trove of J.B. 's work.
Mr. Monaco relates numerous other stories from the family's rich history:
how during the 1906 earthquake and fire the family home on Leavenworth
and surrounding buildings were saved by a bucket brigade, how J.B.
ingeniously managed to photograph at the Pan Pacific Exposition of 1915 the
nude portrait of "Stella,", how during the Depression J.B. was forced to sell
priceless glass negatives that were recycled as salvage.
Page 1
Mr. Monaco recounts details from his own growing up of coolers and
iceboxes, of junkmen and vegetable vendors, of Kezar Stadium and Playland
at the Beach, of vintage streetcars and Key System trains on the Bay
Bridge. He speaks of race and ethnic relations in the 1930s and 1940s when,
unlike him, all the other North Beach Italian children had fathers who were
either fishermen or garbage men and where, if the Italian families "raised
enough hell", they would be able to get their children transferred from the
heavily Chinese Francisco Junior High to Marina Junior High where the student
body was predominantly Caucasian.]
AUDREY TOMASELLI: The following interview is being conducted as part of
the Telegraph Hill Dwellers oral history project. I am interviewing Richard
Monaco in his office at 234 9th Street in San Francisco. May I call you
Richard?
RICHARD MONACO: Call me Dick. You know actually my name is John. That's
another story we'll get to somewhere along the line.
AUDREY: Your family name, Monaco, is already identified with recording and
preserving our neighborhood's history.
DICK: Through my grandfather's photographs, yes.
AUDREY: I wonder if you would be willing, for those folks who will be
reading this transcript, to just say a few sentences about him by way of
introduction. The legacy that he's left for us.
Page 2
DICK: Okay. Well, a little bit of his background: he was Italian-Swiss,
he was bom in Ticino, Switzerland — a little town called Verscio. His older
brother emigrated to this country in 1 859. He was originally up in mining
country in. Virginia City, Nevada, and he did a little bit of mining when he first
started there. But then he was into other enterprises. Like he was involved
in a partnership in a store, and several other businesses. Then he got
interested in photography. I'm speaking now of my grandfather's brother,
Louis. I'm really going through this fast, but a synopsis.
AUDREY: Yes, that's fine.
DICK: Louis got interested in photography in 1 869, and he started a
small photographic studio in Virginia City that same year. In 1871 the silver
mining economy moved to Eureka, Nevada. So he moved to Eureka in 1871
and opened a photography studio. And my grandfather joined him from the
old country in 1 875.
Prior to my grandfather being affiliated with him, my grandfather's older
brother, Marino, had been working with Louis in Eureka; then Marino moved
down to Stockton, so my grandfather took his place in Eureka, Nevada. And
they remained in Eureka until 1 888.
AUDREY: Your grandfather came to this country in 1875, so he was just
about 1 9, I guess.
DICK: Yes. He and his brother stayed and worked in Eureka until 1 888.
AUDREY: So that was more than 1 0, let's see, 1 3 years?
Page 3
DICK: That's quite a while. Yes. The early part of his experience in this
country was in Eureka.
AUDREY: And all this time he was doing photography?
DICK: Oh, yes. He worked with Louis. He learned the trade through
Louis. And Louis was a very prominent figure in the history of Eureka,
Nevada. They have a museum up there now, and I've supplied 'em with a lot
of the photographs that they have. He's been written up in the Nevada
Historical Journal. Louis played a big part in the Italian politics of Eureka --
the Fishcreek War and the charcoal burners' plight up there. He was
involved in all that. He was a spokesman for them because his English was
good, and the rest of these guys didn't speak English at all.
AUDREY: What kind of photography were they doing in the mining town of
Eureka?
DICK: It was a mining town but it was a fairly good size, one of the
larger towns in Nevada at that time. Silver mining specifically. A little bit
lead and the rest silver.
AUDREY: Were they studio photographers?
DICK: Well, yes. They were itinerant, too, to the extent that they went
all around the countryside and photographed the mines and the Indians.
AUDREY: Who paid them for that kind of shooting?
Page 4
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DICK: They did it just because they enjoyed doing it. The studio was
where their income came from.
AUDREY: And their clientele were? •
DICK: Were the people there, in the town. There were some families
there. The living conditions were just atrocious. I mean, there was lead
mining, and there was smog continually, and you could hardly breathe.
Compared to today's standards you wouldn't believe it.
AUDREY: It's hard to imagine folks in that kind of situation having the
luxury to spend money on photography.
DICK: Well, there was a lot of money changing hands. They were
taking a lot of silver out of the ground. There were some wealthy people
there. Louis did very well up there. He made a lot of money, bought a lot of
property, went broke, made a lot of money. They had floods and fires that
wiped out the city, and then they'd have to recover from that and start over
again and so forth. And then it all petered out, around 1885 to 1888. The
mines were running dry. That's when they decided to come back to San
Francisco.
They came back to San Francisco, and they had two locations on Market
Street. The first, the original location in San Francisco, was
on the 1 1 00 block of Market Street. They were there for only a year or so.
Then they moved farther down east to 703 Market at Kearny. And they
were there until about 1 902.
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When Louis died my grandfather took over the studio there, and there were
bad times. They had one peal< period, I guess, during the Spanish-American
War. My grandfather photographed the soldiers going overseas. But the
business was poor there. It made sense for him to move to North Beach
because he spoke Italian. This was after he got married, and his wife was a
much better businessperson than he was, and I think she pointed out to him
that It would be smart to move to North Beach. So he moved to North Beach
in 1 904, and he was here from 1 904 until the year before he died, until
1 937. And he was certainly the most prominent studio photographer in
North Beach for most of that period.
AUDREY: Well, again, looking at his birth date, 1856, he was not quite 50
when he moved to North Beach and started the business here.
DICK: That's right. He was only 48.
AUDREY: So is that when his business began to do really well?
DICK: I don't know whether it immediately began to do well, but he did
very well in later years. He was very comfortable.
AUDREY: I know that there are many of his photographs which record the
devastation of the earthquake and fire in North Beach in 1 906. As far as
you know, are those the only photographs that exist of the City in those
years, or were there other photographers?
DICK: Oh no, there were other photographers. But I really believe, I am
Page 6
Studk) at 234 Columbus
absolutely positive that his photographs are the best and the most extensive
collection of earthquake and fire photographs of North Beach and Russian Hill
and Telegraph Hill. That part of town, without question. And I have about,
oh, probably 60 or 70 earthquake and fire photographs.
AUDREY: You were nine years old when he died, you told me. What is your
earliest memory?
DICK: Oh let's see, I remember the studio. I have a vague recollection
of the studio and the smell of photographic chemicals when you walked in the
front door. That was at 234 Columbus. And there used to be a bowling alley
there. And I used to sneak down the stairs and go next door and watch the
people bowl there. They didn't have automatic pin setters in those days.
They had old winos who used to work there and set up the pins. I remember
that quite well. Loop, Loop Bowling Alley it was called. I can't place the
bowling alley exactly, but it's my impression that it was right next door to
my grandfather's building, but I'm not absolutely sure. It was a long time
ago.
My grandfather owned that building at 234 Columbus. Cortese, a jeweler, had
his jewelry shop on the first floor, and my grandfather had the two top
floors. Tosca would have been north of him. You'll recognize that building if
you walk down there. It's still there.
AUDREY: So that memory, probably - what do you think, were you 5 or 6
at that time?
DICK: Yeah, I'm talking early 1 930s. My grandfather had several other
Page 7
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locations in North Beach. As I mentioned earlier, his first studio in this
neighborhood was in1904 at the corner where Pacific, Kearny and Columbus
Avenue meet. But it was a wooden building and it burned down in the 1 906
fire. A new building was subsequently constructed on that site, and he
eventually moved back around 1 908. You might be familiar with that building
at 205 Columbus. Mister Bing's is on the ground floor. If you walk by the
building today, on the Columbus Avenue side, you will see a slanted rooftop
with windows where the studio was located. He was there from, say, 1 908
to 1 922, when he bought the building across the street at 234 Columbus.
That's the studio I was telling you about that I remember from my childhood.
And he was there until he retired.
[Note: Prior to the earthquake and fire, what we now know as Columbus
Avenue was called Montgomery Avenue. In 1 909 the Board of Supervisors
changed the name to Columbus Avenue to alleviate confusion with
Montgomery Street; and it has been generally assumed that the name
Columbus was chosen because of the very large Italian community.]
But getting back to 1906, when my grandfather's first studio was lost, and
that site was under reconstruction, he moved to a temporary location on
Broadway right alongside the old county jail. It was on the north side of
Broadway just east of Columbus. The Condor is right on the corner now, and
the studio was about two storefronts down from there. [Note: A few years
after this interview the Condor was replaced by Andrew Jaeger's House of
Seafood & Jazz.]
AUDREY: And you say the county jail was nearby?
Page 8
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DICK: Yep. Public hangings. Used to have public hangings. Not in his
time, but earlier, during the Gold Rush and up to the 1 880s. I can show you
right here in this picture on the wall. The county jail is the tall building on the
right, just a couple of doors down from my grandfather's studio. That's
where he moved after the fire until the new building was finished in 1 908.
Notice the Monaco logo in the photo. J.B. etched it onto a glass negative. I
still have that negative. [Note: The Italian word for photograph is fotografia
or shortened to foto as in the logo.]
AUDREY: I see that there are street cars there.
DICK: Sure, I remember streetcars on Broadway, but I don't know
exactly what their route was. But I do remember that the old E-car used to
run from the Ferry Building. It started down by the Ferry Building and wound
its way through what used to be the produce markets district, eventually
went up Columbus Avenue and up Union over the hills and made a left hand
turn down Larkin to Green and somehow or other ended up in the Marina
eventually. From the Ferry Building to the Marina was through North Beach
and over Russian Hill. All the way to the Presidio. That was the E-car.
And the old F-car, that ran to the Marina also. It started around 3rd and
Market, down by the old Roos Brothers on Market. It crossed Market, up
Stockton, through the Stockton Street tunnel to Columbus, to North Point,
left on Van Ness then turned down Chestnut Street to the Marina.
AUDREY: Okay. This is all very important historical information.
Page 9
DICK: A lot of people have to know this stuff [laughs]. But no, I'm
absolutely sure of the E-car and the F-car. I remember them well. When I
started Cal [University of California, Berkeley], I was commuting at the time,
and I used to take the F-car, but I had to transfer somewhere and I'd end up
at the old Key System Terminal [now known as the Transbay Terminal]. I'd
come back on the E-car, because that stopped very close to the Ferry
Building and the terminal. We'd catch the E-car, and that would follow the
route that I just described to you, over Russian Hill on Union and I'd walk down
Leavenworth Street to our house.
AUDREY: Did you ever take the ferry back from the East Bay?
DICK: No, we didn't take the ferry. As a matter of fact, I don't think
the ferries were still running then. We took the old Key System, the electric
trains on the bottom of the Bay Bridge.
AUDREY: Okay, so this is something else I wanted to ask that I haven't
been able to get a lot of information about. Was there a train that ran on
the Bay Bridge originally? On the lower tier?
DICK: Oh, yes. The Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge were both
completed roughly the same time ~ within a year of each other, about 1 936,
'37, something like that. The lower tier of the Bay Bridge was built for
trains. The Key. It was an electric railroad and was named the Key System.
I don't know the reason for the name.
[Note. A kind researcher named Dorothy Danielson contributed the following
explanation of the Key System gleaned from information found at the
Page 10
National Maritime Museum Library: In 1 903, the San Francisco, Oakland & San
Jose Railway commenced ferry operations on San Francisco Bay from a pier
in Oakland and a finger pier a mile northeast of Verba Buena Island (then
known as Goat Island). It provided service from Oakland and other cities into
San Francisco, with the trains connecting to the East Bay ferry terminals.
This company adopted the key as an emblem because of the skeleton key
shape of its track system and finger pier. Thus, the name "Key Route" or
"Key System" supplanted the more formal corporate name with which the
company started life. In 1 930 San Francisco had the largest fleet of
ferryboats in the world. However, with the construction of the Bay Bridge In
1936, the light rail system provided service directly to a terminal in San
Francisco and supplanted much of the ferry traffic, but the "Key System"
name was retained.]
Sometime about 1958 or 1959 they reconfigured the bridge. They got rid of
public transportation and they had to lower the bridge tunnel through Verba
Buena Island to accommodate the high trucks. They discontinued the train
on the lower tier to make it available for cars. Originally the Bay Bridge had
automobile traffic in both directions on the top deck and the Key System
trains on one side of the lower level and trucks on the other side of the lower
level.
AUDREV: So automobile traffic must have just increased tremendously
after the war to cause that major change on the Bay Bridge.
DICK: That's the story of California after the war. California was built
on the automobile. People moved to California. People moved to the
suburbs, and the popular thing was to commute, to get in your car and drive.
Page 11
2434 and 2430 Leavenwortti
he bought the house next door at 2434, which had been built in 1 888, and
that's the house I grew up in.
As an aside, my father told me a story that had been in the family about
when those flats my grandfather had built at 2430 were under construction
in 1 904. During the excavation the contractor discovered a buried pirate
treasure chest. You know, the Bay wall used to be all the way up to Jones
Street at one point, just one block downhill from Leavenworth. So it's
entirely plausible that the guys just walked up from the Bay and stashed
their stuff! But we don't know who claimed the treasure chest when it was
discovered during the excavation.
You would never recognize my grandfather's flats at 2430 Leavenworth
today. He sold the flats to the Ford family in the early 1 920s. The Fords
remodeled about 1937. Richard Neutra was the well known architect who
redid the property. He removed the Victorian front and modernized it with a
much less ornate plywood facade.
AUDREY: What was your grandfather's reaction to what Neutra did to the
house?
DICK: He thought Neutra was crazy. And my father did, too.
AUDREY: Now when was this picture taken?
DICK: This picture was taken in 1 906 right after the earthquake and
fire. I digress here, but this is by way of explaining. They turned back the
fire on this corner here at Chestnut and Leavenworth. Everything else
Page 14
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burned down. You can see all the destruction, all the way down to the wharf.
It was all burned out. But they were able to stop the fire there because
around the corner on Francisco Street, down the block, was a house with a
natural well. The Hildebrands lived there. So they formed a bucket brigade,
and they hung wet sheets at this corner, right here on Chestnut and
Leavenworth, and they fought it for eight or ten hours. And then the wind
shifted and the block was saved. And the houses we're looking at in this
photo are all still there. Every one of these houses on Chestnut Street is
still there. As well as on Leavenworth, except for one that had been flats
but is now a big set of condominiums.
AUDREY: Amazing. Did this story come to you directly from your
grandfather?
DICK: It's hard for me to recall what I heard from my grandfather and
what was passed down to me by my father. I don't remember the specifics.
I don't remember really talking about the earthquake and fire with my
grandfather very much. It was a long time ago.
But I do remember a conversation with my Irish grandmother. Grandma
Callahan. I was a little kid and we were sitting in her kitchen. The subject of
the earthquake came up. She got very emotional and said to me, "I hope
that you never have to experience anything like that in your life." Her family
had to evacuate their home and move to one of the temporary tent cities. It
was either in Golden Gate Park or the Presidio. A month later she lost her 4
month old twins to diphtheria. The girl's name was Frances and the boy was
Frank. There were several "tent cities" set up for refugees. There was one
down in Washington Square for over a year.
Page 15
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AUDREY: There's a photo here of your other grandmother and a neighbor
using a temporary stove outside of the Leavenworth Street house. If their
home had been saved from the fire and was intact, why did they have to set
up a stove outdoors? •
DICK: Because of earthquake damage to chimneys, you were not
allowed to cook or start a fire indoors for fear of starting another fire.
There were many stoves set up outside around the City.
AUDREY: Getting back to driving around with your folks looking at the
Christmas lights at the fire houses, do you remember the family car?
DICK: Oh sure. 1936 Ford.
AUDREY: Was it rare for folks to have cars at that point?
DICK: My father started to drive very young and my mother drove, and
not many women drove in her time. There's not a parking place on the block
today. There's continual traffic going to the wharf. Lombard, the zigzag
street, is just one block above there. Just continual traffic nowadays. When
we were kids we used to play baseball in that street, right in the middle of
the street, and every half hour or 45 minutes or so a car would come along.
We'd get very upset when a car came along. If anybody ever parked on the
block and interfered with our baseball field, we'd be furious.
AUDREY: So there were practically no cars parked there.
Page 16
DICK: That's what brought that to mind. Yes, there were very few
cars. There wasn't a car in the house next door to us. Betty Ford had a car.
I think there were only two cars on the block when I was growing up. When I
was young, people didn't park there at all.
AUDREY: So were you a little more privileged than your friends, because
your family had a car?
DICK: Well you know, we were all broke. I grew up during the
Depression. My grandfather went broke. He had been doing very well. The
way I understand it, he owned the piece of property on Leavenworth Street,
he owned the studio, everything was paid for, everything was clear. He
probably had $250,000 in the bank, which was a lot of money for those
times, and his wife had just passed away. As I mentioned earlier, I've been
told that she had a much more astute financial approach than he did. And he
got Into Transamerica stock at the very end. Not on margin. Put all this
money from his bank account into that stock.
So he had no cash. He had the property, the studio on Columbus Avenue, but
the tenant couldn't pay him. Said there's no point in kicking the tenant out
because nobody can pay rent. Things deteriorated and deteriorated. As a
matter of fact, I learned sometime later that the only way that my father
saved the house after my grandfather died had to do with a $10,000
insurance policy my father had taken out when I was born in 1 928. The
taxes came due on the property. And by that time my grandfather had lost
the studio. The Bank of America had foreclosed on him just for taxes that
had not been paid. Bear in mind, there was all this real property but no cash
whatsoever. So he lost the studio and then shortly after my grandfather
Page 17
died, my father became aware that the City was coming after the house
because of taxes past due. And the only way that he saved the house was
that he was able to take half of the $10,000 life insurance policy out in cash
and pay the taxes.
But you see I wasn't aware of this when I was a kid growing up. And yes,
people thought we were rich because we had the big house. That was it. And
also both my parents spoke English. That made us different from most of
the kids I went to school with. We all had cardboard in our shoes. We ate, we
ate fine, and we didn't think of ourselves as being poor. And then that's
when my father got into the film business.
There was the old amateur film they called Univex. It was 8-mm film. And he
was processing it in the basement of the house. And they had the
orthochromatic film and the panchromatic film, and he got 35 cents a roll
for doing the orthochromatic film and 50 cents a roll for doing the
panchromatic film. He used to have a young man who worked for him who
used to go downtown to all the stores to pick up the film and so forth. So he
made a relatively decent living during the Depression.
AUDREY: This is motion pictures?
DICK: Motion picture film. 8-mm motion picture film. He processed it
in the basement. But as I say, I never knew we had a Depression when I was
growing up. I never knew, I never knew the misery that my grandfather went
through, you know, and lost everything, or how desperate my parents were.
Everybody I went to school with experienced the same circumstances. But in
a strange way we often reminisce about "the good old days".
Page 18
AUDREY: I keep wanting to go back to looking at the Christmas lights with
your family. It's such a charming story. You said that you came back in the
car and your grandfather had these warm bricks which he had wrapped in
newspaper. *
DICK: Yes. The brick itself would be too hot if it made contact with you.
But wrapped in newspaper it was just comfortable.
AUDREY: The newspaper didn't burn?
DICK: I don't know how he did it, but it didn't burn [laughs]. It worked.
And he used to roast chestnuts in front of the fireplace. He used to set
fires all the time. And that house on Leavenworth Street, we had six
fireplaces in the house on Leavenworth. We only used two of them but that
was in the living room and what we used to call the front parlor. He always
had a fire going in there.
AUDREY: And was the front parlor different from the living room?
DICK: It was two huge rooms separated by sliding doors which were
always open. There was a fireplace in each room. And then alongside of that
there was a dining room. This house that I lived in had been a mansion,
actually. It was built by a man named McGlynn in 1 888. He was an early
railroad executive in San Francisco, and it was a huge house. Much larger
than anything any of my friends lived in.
Like I say, we were broke, and the house, that house was falling apart. I sold
Page 19
that house after my dad died. We moved my mother to a condominium in
Marin, close to us, and what did I get, about $248,000 for the house. I think
we sold it in 1 976. Now, bear in mind they've made improvements in it, but
it's at least three million dollars now because it's one of the few existing
semi-mansions on the eastern slope of Russian Hill. It was just huge. I never
liked the house. It was dark. You only had an eastern exposure in the
morning. So in the back of the house you got sunshine. But in the front of
the house, the big apartments on the other side of the street took away the
afternoon sun. You know, it had a gorgeous view from one bedroom and the
bathroom. [Laughs]. They just didn't, they didn't value a view in those days.
AUDREY: So the front parlor and the living room were adjoining rooms.
How were they used differently from each other?
DICK: They were used together, actually. For the most part. I think
there was more activity in the living room. My father's family was very
small. He was an only child and had few relatives. My father had a lot of
friends. We saw a lot of his friends, but had no family involvement. Whereas
on my mother's side, she was one of 1 2 kids, and they used to have huge
Christmas parties. My mother always had Christmas dinner, and all the
Callahans were there. I remember Christmas Eve as a little kid. Christmas
Eve in that living room. And my uncle Mick drank a lot, but he lived to be 85.
Mick Higgins -- nice, nice guy. Very, very bright guy but he really liked to
drink. He always played Santa Claus, and he'd come staggering down the
stairs, the bag of toys over his shoulder. My brother says, "That's not
Santa Claus, that's Uncle Mick." [Laughs]
AUDREY: So your grandfather would have the fires going for you. And
Page 20
heat the bricks and roast the chestnuts. Do you have any idea why that was
important to him, making the fires?
DICK: Kind of like the old country thing. My grandfather didn't eat with
us. Particularly while he still had the business. He ate lunch out every day.
He loved polenta. He used to make himself polenta in the morning. He'd
make himself polenta at night. Just stir up a little bit and fry it. And the
other recollection I have, as a matter of fact, is we didn't have a
refrigerator but we had the coolers. The cooler was just something cut out
of the wall between our house and the house next door where the sun never
hit it. And my grandfather used to get gorgonzola cheese, and several
others, and he'd put it in there until it got sour. He wouldn't touch it until it
was, I don't know how old. He'd forget the milk, and he'd let the milk go sour.
He just loved that sort of stuff and he ate a lot of that. We all just turned
our noses up at it. How could he eat this stuff?
AUDREY: Polenta and dairy — that's very Swiss.
DICK: Exactly. Swiss, very Swiss.
AUDREY: Several other folks have mentioned these coolers that hung
outside the window, but I just can't get a clear picture of them. Could you
describe them for me?
DICK: Yes. This was a good size. It was probably a foot deep. It went
in the space between our house and the adjoining house, and they just kind
of built a cabinet, a closed cabinet. No, actually I think there were screens in
there to let air in. ,
Page 21
AUDREY: And it hung outside -- you accessed it from the window?
DICK: Well, picture the house abutting the house alongside of it, and
there was a space, maybe two feet between the two houses. So they just
went out from our house, cut a hole in the wall and put a cabinet in there,
with doors on it, and that was what they called the cooler. It was just a
shaded area that kept cool. The sun never got near there, so it was a cool
area.
AUDREY: And it was screened on the outside?
DICK: It might have been screened on one end. I'm not positive.
AUDREY: And what were the doors like?
DICK: Doors that you pulled open, like cabinet doors.
AUDREY: Some people have described this as kind of an orange crate
nailed under the window, and they'd open the window and access it that way.
I guess there were different varieties of the same thing.
DICK: Yes. But I think the important thing was to keep it in a shady
area where you wouldn't get sun. That's why they called it a cooler. We got
our first refrigerator some time during the war, second hand from friends of
ours. I remember we were so excited to have a refrigerator. Again, I think it
was Benedetti who was talking about the iceman coming. [See Telegraph Hill
Dwellers' oral history of Dante Benedetti, part of this collection.] I remember
Page 22
that so well as a kid. The iceman was a nice guy. His name was Tony. He
used to wear the rubber apron and the big gloves and had the tongs to pick
up the block of ice and walk in and put it into the icebox. That's the way you
kept the food cold. You'd have a big block of ice in this insulated cabinet that
was made for that specific purpose. The iceman would come around every
day or at least every other day if not every day, and deliver ice blocks -- big,
huge blocks of ice.
AUDREY: Was this in addition to the cooler that was in the shaded area
between the houses? An icebox was a freestanding thing that was in the
kitchen?
DICK: Exactly.
AUDREY: So first there was the cooler and then the icebox and then the
refrigerator.
DICK: The cooler and the icebox were about the same time. The
refrigerator came later. Our first one probably came about 1 944, something
like that, '43, '44.
AUDREY: The icebox, then, was not electric?
DICK: No, it was just the box, pretty well insulated. The doors, you
know, were sealed, so as to not let any heat in. You kept it cold. The iceman
delivered these big blocks of ice that they just shoved in there.
AUDREY: Can you give me an idea of the size of the block of ice?
Page 23
DICK: Two feet by maybe a foot deep, a foot high, something like that.
They used to pick it up with these tongs and struggle down the hall with it.
And he was a nice, jolly old guy. We used to steal ice from him. All the kids
did. And he'd make a pretense of chasing us, but all it was, was little chips
of ice. We'd run, go grab a chip of ice, and run away sucking the ice.
AUDREY: Where'd they make the ice? How did they get it?
DICK: Ice house someplace, I don't know.
AUDREY: Maybe the old ice house on Battery Street?
DICK: Quite possibly, I don't know. It sounds like it. It makes sense,
doesn't it?
AUDREY: Did the iceman have a horse-drawn wagon?
DICK: No, no, he had a truck. Speaking of horse-drawn wagons. . . that
was a little before my time, but there were still a couple around when I was a
kid. The junk man ~ "rags, bottles, sacks" he used to cry as he drove his
horse along. That's all he said, "rags, bottles, sacks." If you had something
you wanted to sell to him, some old junk, he'd buy it or sell you some old junk.
AUDREY: What did he do with it?
DICK: He resold it. I'm sure he made a little bit on it. This brings to
mind the peddler. He used to go down to the commission markets every
Page 24
morning to select vegetables and load up his truck with good stuff. He'd
make the rounds and all the housewives would go out every day and buy some
carrots and some spinach and some potatoes and so on.
And there was the nut guy. He'd go up to the corner and yell "semenza,
semenza." He'd walk around with this big tray of a variety of nuts and
seeds, and people would come running to buy the nuts. The tray had straps
attached which went over his shoulders.
[Note: According to another narrator who is Sicilian, semenza is a word
(not found in the Italian dictionary) from the Sicilian dialect. It is generic for
seeds ~ pumpkin, sunflower, etc. He reminisced, "My paternal grandfather
always carried pumpkin semenza in his pocket in a little paper bag. He also
carried agalia which is the Sicilian word for dried chick peas. They were our
health food snacks. Street cart vendors would sell them and sing out
'semenza e agalia' elongating the // — a. I remember it as if it were
yesterday."]
And there was the organ grinder with the monkey. As I recall he was a funny
little man (probably Italian, but I'm not sure) with a cute little monkey.
Several times a month this guy and his monkey would show up on the corner
of Leavenworth and Chestnut and do their thing. The man would crank away
at his organ (a rectangular box with a crank handle). As I remember, I think
it was supported by a post in the middle of the box. On the sidewalk, the
monkey danced and performed to the music produced by the cranking of the
organ. The monkey wore a costume, more like a uniform with a small round
cap on his head (like a bell hop's cap) and flirted with the onlookers. The
monkey was very good at presenting the tin cup for the donations.
Page 25
Whatever money I might have put in the cup my mother gave me, and it would
not have been more than a nickel or dime. I am sure she had to give me a lot
of encouragement and a good shove to put anything in the cup because at
that age of 5 or 6 years old, I certainly did not enjoy being the center of
attention.
The old waterfront at that time was lumberyards, warehouses and vacant
lots where now you have all the expensive hotels and all the tourist places
and so forth. The carnival used to come to town. Down on Leavenworth
around North Point. They'd come once a year and set up their tents and
their games and all that kind of stuff.
Inl939, during the World's Fair on Treasure Island they used to have
fireworks displays. I don't recall how often but frequently. And the eastern
side of Russian Hill would be crowded with people watching the fireworks. On
the Fourth of July in those days, everybody had firecrackers. They used to
go up to Chinatown and buy them. Somebody always got hurt, but nobody
ever was severely injured. I remember during the World's Fair, the day after
the Fourth of July, we'd go up and down Leavenworth Street and find all of
these unexploded firecrackers. We'd have a treasure trove. We could put
'em together and make bombs out of them. Little bombs [laughs].
1 939 Fair, I remember that fairly well. I was going to Hancock Grammar
School at the time. I remember going over on the ferry. I don't remember
ever going over in a car to Treasure Island. I'm sure people did go in a car,
but they couldn't have had a heck of a lot of parking space for cars. I
remember taking the old ferry. I digress. Ask me a question.
Page 26
AUDREY: I guess I wanted to get back to the peddlers coming around.
DICK: Okay, Tony was his name. The milkman and the peddler were
both named Tony. Both Italian guys, but I don't remember their last names.
There used to be the dairy right down on Bay Street where the projects, as
we called them, are now. The old Golden State Dairy. We called it the old
horse lot. That's where kids played baseball. And I was just a little kid. But
know exactly where the horse lot was. They had cleaned up the area there
and put in a baseball field.
[Note: In his description of "horses' lot", Dante Benedetti (who was a
generation older than Dick Monaco), on page 1 1 of his THD oral history
states: "So the younger kids used to choose sides there at the creamery
and when the horses went out, we got the manure and made first base and
second base and third base. It was where those rental projects are now on
Bay Street. That's where the creamery was. And when all the horses went
out, that's what we did. Joe DiMaggio played there. A lot of great ball
players came from there. It was all turf, clay."]
Also on Bay Street there was La Fiesta Restaurant. There was the dairy.
The big thing farther on down on Bay Street was Simmons Mattress Factory.
That was one of the biggest industries in the City at the time. I remember
that.
[Note: In the 1 930 San Francisco telephone directory, The Simmons
Company indicated that they made iron and brass beds, springs, 'sanitary
couches', hair mattresses, cotton mattresses, box springs and all kinds of
'top mattresses'. They were at 295 Bay Street, southeast corner of Powell.
Page 27
In an advertisement it showed they also made cots and ship berths.]
I remember when they built the projects. I was in the Army during the time
they were building, from 1952 through '54. The theory was that these were
for old retired Italian fisherman. Oh, that's the way they wrote the thing up.
It kind of deteriorated over the years. It was called the North Beach Housing
Project, so far as I know. It was a Federal project. I can still remember
reading about it.
[Note: In September 2004 the newly rebuilt North Beach Place was open for
tenants. It is a two-block-long complex of public housing units and affordable
apartments. According to Volume 5 Number 9 of the North Beach Journal,
"The new North Beach Place replaces a rundown, blocky complex that was
built in 1952 for World War II veterans and their families."]
I knew people who lived in those places in the very beginning. A fellow I went
to school with, while he was going to college, he and his wife were living in one
of those units down there. So it was quite different in those days. There
was no black population in San Francisco at that time. I remember when I
went to Marina Junior High School, there was one black kid in the school and
Galileo High School was very much the same. Well, hell, in the days prior to
the war, San Francisco was a very small city.
AUDREY: Were there ever any Italian fishermen who lived in that Federal
housing project?
DICK: I would imagine there might have been one or two. There were a
lot of fishermen where I lived on Leavenworth. North Beach was three or
Page 28
four different communities actually. I grew up on Russian Hill, the very
northern end near Fisherman's Wharf. I didn't get down to central North
Beach very much, around the plaza [Washington Square] or even farther
down around Broadway. But I grew up with a lot of kids. Some grew up on
Telegraph Hill, some grew up where I did, and where they lived did more or
less relate to what their parents did, what their occupation was. There were
a lot of Sicilians around where I was because they were closer to the wharf
and the Sicilians were all fishermen.
When I started the first grade, it was a traumatic experience for me. First
day in the first grade at Sarah B. Cooper School. And the teacher says,
"Now what does your father do, Johnny?" — Joey, and so forth. Johnny says,
"my father's a garbage man," and Joey says, "my father's a fisherman."
More of the northern Italians were garbage men and most of the southern
Italians were fishermen. This was almost exclusively true. Some of the
southern Italians weren't fishermen, but they were affiliated with the fish
industry in one way or another. Everyone in the class except for myself and
Jane Oldfield. I was so embarrassed when I stood up and had to say my
father was a photographer. I felt like crying because I was so different. And
Jane Oldfield's father was a well-known artist at the time.
AUDREY: He worked on the Coit Tower murals, didn't he?
DICK: Yes he did, as a matter of fact. He was definitely involved in
that. And next door to us on Leavenworth Street was Ruth Cravath. She
was a well known sculptor. One that you will definitely recognize was Adaline
Kent, from the Kent family. Her husband was Bob Howard. He was a well
known sculptor in San Francisco. They lived right on the corner of
Page 29
Leavenworth and Francisco.
AUDREY: That's a poignant story about your embarrassment at your
father being a photographer.
DICK: It was different. See, you didn't want to be different.
AUDREY: You said earlier that your folks spoke English.
DICK: Yes. My mother was Irish. My father didn't speak Italian at all
because his parents did not speak Italian to him. When they came to this
country, it was earlier than the turn of the century. Most of the other kids'
parents had come here in the 1920s and even the 1930s. Their native
language was Italian. So the kids learned to speak Italian before they learned
to speak English. And I envy them. I really wish I could speak Italian. I
understand it a little bit. I was always a little bit different, and very
conscious of it, and not comfortable with it. We lived in a big house. And I
didn't go to church, and my mother made me wear short pants to school until
the fourth grade!
AUDREY: So then your earliest friends were mostly Sicilian, would you say?
DICK: No, let's see, a mixture, northern Italian and southern Italian and
we were very close to them. Well, actually they were from all over Italy, but
you know the Genovese were mostly in the garbage business. And the
Sicilians and Neapolitans were in the fishing industry. There were quite a few
non-Italians up around there, too. I mentioned Bob Howard and Adaline Kent.
Hildebrand was around the corner there. There was the whole Napolitano
Page 30
family that lived on Francisco Street. Then you came up Francisco Street
and there were the Ertolas and Guides. They were northern Italian. Verga
was northern Italian, I believe. So many of the kids I went to school with
became professionals, became accountants and attorneys. There was an
ethic in those families and the next generation went on to college.
AUDREY: We were talking earlier about the peddlers who came around.
How about grocery stores?
DICK: Well, there was no such thing as a supermarket. There were a
lot of small grocery stores. They were all on Bay Street, the commercial
block. You wouldn't find any up on Leavenworth or Francisco or Chestnut
where we were. But down on Columbus Avenue or Bay Street, a main
thoroughfare. As a matter of fact, mother's father was a shopkeeper. He
had a little grocery store on the corner of Hyde and Bay for three or four
years. That was a grocery store forever when I was a kid. And then there
was Pete's -- Pete Di Giulio was his name -- and that's where we traded. He
had good meat. He was a butcher, and it was just a small grocery store.
They owned the property and they lived behind. They had an accounting
system: if they got to know you and they trusted you, they'd write it down in
a little book and at the end of the month you'd come and pay them.
Pete's was on Bay Street halfway between Leavenworth and Hyde. A little
closer to Leavenworth than to Hyde. And then on the corner of Hyde and
Bay, that was Gibson's, another grocery store. That was the one that my
Irish grandfather Timothy Callahan had had many years prior.
AUDREY: And were they on the north side of Bay Street or the south side?
Page 3 1
Richard Mon<»co (wviUi skinned knee), 1935
DICK: North side. There were no businesses on the south side of Bay
Street [west of Columbus], However on the east side of Columbus, there
were all kinds of businesses on both sides of Bay Street. But from Columbus
Avenue, or certainly from Leavenworth Street, all the way to the Marina
there wasn't a business on the south side of the Bay Street. Those were all
residences.
AUDREY: Did your mother send you to Pete's?
DICK: Oh, yeah. I've got another story to tell you about being
different. My mother made me wear short pants through the third grade.
Man, I had a tough time as a kid. Anyhow, yes, I used to go to the store all
the time for her. And you know, I would be petrified to send a young kid down
there these days, with the traffic. There wasn't that much traffic then.
Although a kid from around the corner from us on Chestnut Street did get
hit by a car there one time, crossing Bay Street, and damn near got killed.
Serious concussion. Gus Marino was his name.
Louis De Mattel lived on the corner Chestnut and Leavenworth. He was a
police inspector, a detective. You've probably heard something about him.
He was the one who caught the guy trying to bomb St. Peter and Paul's.
Some nut had something against the church; he had bombed it several times
while it was under construction. So the police set a trap for him and De
Mattel caught him. He was a big hero. In those days the police cars had
running boards. And occasionally, big thrill, he'd let us stand on the running
board and drive up the street and blow the siren. I was about 8 or 9 years
old.
Page 32
AUDREY: Getting back to your grandfather, you mentioned that his real
name was Giovanni Battista.
DICK: That's right. And my grandfather had a sister who was a nun. I
just don't like to go into this too much. I'm not too comfortable with it.
[The English translation of Giovanni Battista is John the Baptist.]
AUDREY: Well, we don't have to go there. But you did mention to me that
he was not too fond of the church.
DICK: That's right. It had to do with the fact that he felt that the
church had abused the poor people in the old country.
AUDREY: And so he preferred to be known as J.B. Can we say just that?
DICK: And another reason was that he wanted to become
Americanized. He certainly didn't want to be called Giovanni Battista
because that was too Italian. That generation of Italians wanted to become
Americanized immediately.
AUDREY: Yes. As long as we're back to your grandfather again, could you
tell me the Stella story you promised to tell?
DICK: Sure. Sure. The essence of it is that during the 191 5 Panama
Pacific Exposition in the Marina, they had on display this, what at the time
was considered extremely risque photograph. Actually people don't realize
it, but It was a painting. People thought it was a photograph, but it was a
Page 33
painting of a nude woman.
The Exposition occupied a great part of the Marina. A lot of that land was
developed specifically for the purpose of the Exposition and then settled by
the wealthier Italians. After they made a couple of bucks in North Beach,
they got stupid and moved to the Marina, and my generation got even
stupider and moved to Marin County. But at any rate, getting back to Stella,
she was a big sensation. There were long lines of men paying 1 0 cents each
to walk in and see this, this painting of the nude woman.
Earlier I mentioned my grandfather's neighbor, Hildebrand. One of the
Hildebrands was a janitor there in one of the buildings adjacent to the building
that Stella was in. You know, it's hard for us to perceive what a sensation
this thing was at that time. Everybody talked about Stella. And my
grandfather and his friends got a bright idea. They went out there one night
and drilled a hole in the wall of the building, and my grandfather took his
camera with him. There was nobody in there at night. There was a light
around the picture, and there was nobody in the room after the fair closed
down. God knows, it might have been midnight, it might have been 2:00 in the
morning. I'll make it 3:00 a.m. so it sounds even more adventurous. But
they went in there, and my grandfather did this time exposure of Stella. He
exposed it for something like half an hour because there was practically no
light in there and the lenses were slow in those days and the film was slow.
AUDREY: And this is through a hole in the wall?
DICK: A hole in the wall. He developed it and the negative was still very
thin, so he went back the following night and exposed it for an hour. Got a
Page 34
real good negative and made prints of it and had prints to show all of his
friends, of the picture of Stella. I heard this story from my father growing
up. And when I discovered this photographic collection, going through it,
there was an envelope. It said "Stella" in my grandfather's writing, and inside
the envelope was the negative and several prints. [This story was
documented in the August/September 1 983 issue of American Heritage
magazine.]
AUDREY: He never sold them? He just did it for fun? To show his friends?
DICK: Just to show his friends. Yes.
AUDREY: He must have had a wonderful sense of humor. Now let me get
this straight: the guy who was the janitor is the one who had nighttime
access to the building adjacent to Stella, but not to Stella's room itself —
which is why they had to drill the hole.
DICK: That's correct. But the way I heard it ~ and you know this might
be convoluted — is that the buildings abutted one another, and they went
through two walls. I'm not positive exactly what the setup was, but I do know
it's true because I've seen the negative.
AUDREY: [Laughs]. Well, as long as we're there, you found this Stella
among buried treasure which you unearthed about 30 years ago, you said.
DICK: Yes. Let me think about this for a second. Sometime between
1948 and 1950, which was 10 years or so after my grandfather died, I
noticed these cases in the upstairs front room of the family house at 2434
Page 35
Leavenworth. At one time this room had been the master bedroom, but it
had not been used for anything but a storage area for many years.
It was sometime in the late 1 940s when I was on a summer break from
college that I decided this would make a neat bedroom for myself. My friend
Jim Walsh and I proceeded to clean up the room and repaint it. The first step
was to get rid of the accumulated "junk". Included in the assortment of old
stuff were five or six metal cases. I took a quick look in them and although I
wasn't really interested in their contents I did notice that there were many
old photographs. I didn't have the heart to throw them out, so I carried the
cases downstairs and stored them under the house in the lower cellar, and
forgot about them. God knows what else we threw out that might have been
valuable.
AUDREY: What size were these cases?
DICK: Two feet, at least two feet by a foot and a half deep and a foot
and a half wide, maybe. They were all in there. I just moved the boxes from
the front bedroom of the house to underneath the house.
AUDREY: When you say under the house, was it an enclosed basement?
DICK: It was enclosed, yes, and the usual access to this specific area,
since the house was built on a hill, was a door into the lower basement. But
this area was too high up. You couldn't reach the space from that door. You
could only reach it from where we put the cases in. And subsequently my
father had built the wall that enclosed it.
Page 36
AUDREY: I now have a much clearer picture of what you're describing.
Because the hill sloped up under the foundation, there was a space from the
floor above where you could just tuck them in?
DICK: That's right.
AUDREY: And some time later the room had been finished off?
DICK: That's right. The sheet rock was put up there.
It was many years later that I found those boxes again. Around 1 970 my
wife and I decided to do a family wall at home. So I was scrounging around
for pictures and such. My father mentioned, "You know, your grandfather
had a lot of really great pictures, even some pictures of the earthquake and
fire." He said, "I don't know what happened to them." I said, "Well, I have an
idea." [Laughs]. So I went down with my son Rob, who was about 8 years old
at the time, and I kicked in the wall and sent him back there with a flashlight.
The first thing he handed out was an old violin, and then he said, "I can't
move it." So I got in there with him and saw the five or six metal cases and
hauled them all out. Some of them were collections of magazines, maps of
Italy and Switzerland and other memorabilia, and some were the pictures.
When I first got into this, I just couldn't believe it. I built a darkroom in my
house and bought myself an enlarger. (There was none of this digital stuff in
those days.) I still remember the feeling as I developed the prints. I've got
the safelights coming down, I've got an exposed positive print in the tray,
and slowly emerges San Francisco history. Watching it happen in front of my
eyes. It was good fun.
Page 37
It's been a passion with me since then. And you know, there are periods of
time when things happen in the business and I just have to get completely out
of working with the collection for awhile. But I always come back to it. And
so I've been publicizing his photographs and making prints myself all these
years.
You know I've seen all these images so many times that I know them inside
out, and I've researched them all so I know what they are. But I haven't seen
all the images by a long shot. I've got something like 1 0,000 negatives, and
I've only paid attention to the North Beach and the family stuff. I've got all
kinds of trips around Northern California and Nevada and so on to look at.
My grandfather had made contact prints of every negative. I examined
them, and I have seen every image probably, but I haven't paid attention to a
lot of them. He spent a lot of time up in Tahoe, for instance, and in
Yosemite. I presume that a Yosemite or a Tahoe historian could find a lot of
interest in these. When I look at them, it looks very much as it does today.
It's just landscape and so on, so there's nothing except for the clothing of
the people in it, to indicate when they were taken. But they're from all over
Northern California, including a lot from Stockton. He did a tour of all of the
missions, and was up to Nevada quite a few times.
One very interesting thing, too, is when he went back to Switzerland in 1 908.
I've got 200 pictures of all the relatives in Switzerland and all the areas, and
the home. The maternal Swiss side of my family originally was from Venice,
but they had been in Switzerland for several centuries. I went over there to
where my grandmother came from, Collinasca, about 1 0 years ago now. I
Page 38
had heard the stories many times. They told me, "You can't believe the
waterfall in front of that house." When I finally saw it, it was really
impressive. We went up there and found that the village where she came
from has only 1 0 or 1 5 people now. My grandfather had taken these
pictures in 1 908. I went up there about 1 0 years ago and took pictures, and
when I came back I compared them to his. Nothing had changed. It was
exactly the same as it was then, except some of the trees had grown a little
bit higher.
There was a little old church there. And my friend Joe Picetti who was with
me, put the camera in there and took a flash shot in the church, and it came
out beautiful. He had the inside of the church. Back to the waterfall. I
couldn't believe it. It was like Niagara Falls. This waterfall outside of their
house was just roaring. Beautiful, beautiful country.
Then I went to Verscio and traced the Monaco side of the family in
Switzerland back to the 1 400s. The church had all the baptismal records
and the weddings and so forth.
My grandfather always said that he loved Switzerland. He never would
consider going back, but he talked about the beauty of Switzerland as
compared to Yosemite. He said, you tell Nina, his niece who raved about
Yosemite, it doesn't compare. This was in a letter that he wrote back to his
wife from Switzerland.
AUDREY: She didn't go with him?
DICK: No, he went with his brother-in-law, Domenico Battistessa. She
Page 39
stayed home with my father.
AUDREY: Getting back to the negatives that you unearthed. Were they
somehow catalogued or dated?
DICK: They were fairly well catalogued. They were in envelopes that
would say "Tahoe Trip, 1 908" and certainly the Switzerland trip. I'm just
thinking about his trip to Switzerland. He went through quite a bit of Italy,
too. Went to the Vatican. I've been to St. Peter's -- thousands of people.
When he took a picture of it in 1 908, there were like 1 5 or 20 people in the
whole courtyard, you know.
AUDREY: And how about the earthquake and fire photos. Does he identify
the street corners and so on?
DICK: No. I did that. It's pretty easy to figure out. As a matter of
fact, I've gone back to the same locations and taken pictures, contemporary
pictures, in the same location.
AUDREY: Of the many negatives that you found in this incredible collection,
some of the prints were published in the book, North Beach. The Italian Heart
of San Francisco. Is that correct?
DICK: Yes. Actually they've been published a number of times.
American Heritage and Time/Life have used them in several series that
they've done. They've been used in TV programs. They've been published 30
or 40 times at least. I don't remember the specifics.
Page 40
AUDREY: There was another story you promised to tell me , as you put it,
"when history was sold for glass".
DICK: True story. Well, this will relate to how my grandfather lost the
business and the studio during the Depression. The poor man was 81 when
Bank of America took over the building in 1937 and sold it to clients of theirs
for back taxes, which were $6,000 at the time.
AUDREY: I don't quite understand. If he didn't have a mortgage, how could
the bank take it?
DICK: He owed taxes. And he had borrowed the money from the bank
to pay the taxes. The crash came in '29 and he died in '38, so it was almost
1 0 years, a period in which he deteriorated terribly. I subsequently met the
man who owned the building. He was a nice man. What the hell was his
name? Camiccia. Dominic Camiccia.
He was from a wealthy family which didn't lose all their money. His mother
bought the building for him. I interviewed him. He's dead now. He was close
to 90 at the time that I interviewed him. He's the one who told me this
story. He said, "When I bought the building I asked your grandfather what he
wanted to do with all these negatives." My grandfather said, "I have no place
to keep them, you can have 'em."
AUDREY: Would you describe for our future historians-when you say
negatives, in this case you don't mean the kind you found in the steel boxes?
DICK: No, these were glass negatives. Studio photographs. These
Page 4 1
were done with a studio camera, in the studio, and they were big glass
negatives, 5"x7". I'm not talking about the frame, I'm talking about the
picture, the insert in the frame -- S^xV, and some were 8''x10''. Glass with
emulsion on them with the negative picture on them. He had them all filed. It
was the history of North Beach. I mean, every prominent person in North
Beach had had his portrait taken by my grandfather. Every family,
everybody's communion picture, everybody's confirmation picture,
everybody's wedding picture. He had the negatives of all of that stuff.
AUDREY: On pieces of glass.
DICK: On glass negatives, that's right. But when he lost the studio he
couldn't print them anymore anyway, I mean, he no longer had the
equipment, he didn't have the setup, and he had no place to store them. So
he told Camillia, you keep them. So Camillia put an ad in the newspaper, two
cents apiece, and sold them. Somebody came along and bought them and
took the emulsion off each one and used them for glass for picture frames.
That's what happened to a good part of the history of North Beach.
AUDREY: What a heartbreaking story.
DICK: The other sad story is what happened to the history of Nevada.
The fire of 1 906. My grandfather had all the stuff that he and his brother
had accumulated through the years of Virginia City and Eureka, Nevada.
That was all in his studio there on Columbus and Kearny. The fire was
sweeping up Kearny Street toward the location, and the federal troops would
not let them go into the building. If anybody crossed the line, they'd shoot
them. So the fire got the studio, and there went a good deal of Nevada and
Page 42
early San Francisco history. The only stuff that was salvaged was what my
grandfather had in his house, which he considered personal. Family pictures
and that type of thing.
Some of the Eureka, Nevada history I was able to salvage from
stereoscopics. They did a lot of stereoscopic pictures. This was
entertainment in those days. No radio and no television or anything. They
had the stereoscope holder at home. I remember as a kid, my grandfather
showing me pictures in the stereo viewer and just being petrified, because it
looked like it had a third dimension and it looked lifelike, you know. At any
rate, that's the story of how a little bit of Nevada history was saved.
Anybody who's interested in this Nevada history and Monaco ought to go up
to that museum in Eureka, Nevada. There's a ton of information on Eureka.
A good deal of the photographic history they have up there came from me,
from my grandfather's stuff and Louis' stuff.
AUDREY: And here in San Francisco, in 1 906, did he actually take pictures
of the fire as it was in progress.
DICK: Oh, I've got many, many pictures of the fire in progress.
AUDREY: So he, somehow or other, had a camera and film with him.
DICK: I guess he had the camera at home.
AUDREY: And enough film to capture the images. I'm trying to imagine
what the experience must have been like.
Page 43
DICK: Well, think about it. You're seeing your business going up in
flames. And at the same time thinking your house is going to go, too. They
were one of the very few fortunate families who saved their home.
AUDREY: Yet at the same time, having the presence of mind to know that
he was capturing history. Or maybe he didn't know.
DICK: I don't think that even occurred to him. God knows what his
thoughts were at the time. But he got some very, very dramatic
photographs.
AUDREY: Wouldn't it be wonderful if he were here now and we could say
to him, what were you thinking, what was your wife thinking, what was her
experience?
Page 44
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AUDREY: Can you explain to those of us who don't know photography why
the studio photographs were on glass, but the photographs in the field or
site photographs were done by some other process?
DICK: Because doing photographs on roll film was just evolving. It was
in its infancy, actually, and the cameras were not that good. But when my
grandfather started out in the business, they used glass. They made the
film themselves. They coated the glass with the emulsion — all in the dark
before they exposed it.
AUDREY: Is it like what we see in the old movies where they have a big
camera on a tripod and they put their head under a black cloth?
DICK: Under a cloth, yeah.
AUDREY: And then after the light flashes, they take some big thing out of
the side of the camera and that's the piece of glass? That's what these
glass negatives were?
DICK: Yes. Some were 5"x7". Others were 8 "x 10".
AUDREY: But when he was taking these exterior photographs in 1 906, with
the roll film, that technology was brand new?
DICK: Oh sure, yes, very new. The cameras were crude. If anybody
who's reading this wants to see one of these cameras, go up to the North
Beach Museum on Stockton Street [1435] upstairs in the old Eureka Savings
Page 45
Building [now US Bank] just a door or two up from Cavalli Bookstore. As you
walk into the museum, there's a display cabinet of Monaco stuff. This
camera that I'm speaking of is sitting in that display cabinet.
AUDREY: The one used to take these exterior pictures?
DICK: I am pretty sure it is the same camera. Actually, it's been
awhile since I've been up there. I think some of the lenses from his studio
cameras are up there, too. And they're big, huge lenses. And just, you know
for your edification, when you look at that picture with the horse in the
front, it's far better quality than any of the other pictures on that wall.
That was taken on a glass negative. See how much sharper it is? All the rest
of the pictures that you see up there were taken with a candid camera.
AUDREY: So he actually took the big old camera out in the street to take
this one.
DICK: That's right. And the reason for that being, that was his
brother-in-law's restaurant, and that's where he met his wife. So I guess it
had a sentimental value to him, and he wanted to take a particularly good
photograph of it.
AUDREY: Just for the edification of our readers, we're looking at a
photograph of the New Buon Gusto Restaurant.
DICK: "The New Buon Gusto Restaurant. G. Battistessa, proprietor".
Battistessa was my grandmother's maiden name. Her father was a
Battistessa and her mother was a Sartoris. And that's a Venetian name.
Page 46
Nina Monaco
But they had been in Switzerland for several generations on that side.
Notice that, see the two doors at the entrance? One says Ladies and the
other Gentlemen.
AUDREY: Do you know where the site was? •
DICK: You know, I'm not absolutely sure. I'm going to say I think it was
either on Broadway or on Columbus Avenue somewhere but I'm not positive.
AUDREY: And it looks like next to it is the Toscano Hotel. That really is
a beautiful photograph - so clear.
DICK: Yeah, you see the difference. My grandfather was an excellent
photographer, and all the other stuff I'm showing was taken with a very
rudimentary hand-held candid camera. It was one of the first ones developed
and so the photographic quality is not as representative of the type of
studio work that he did.
AUDREY: But we do have examples of his studio work.
DICK: Oh yeah. This is a studio photo of his niece Nina Monaco.
AUDREY: You told me, speaking of the studio work, that when you were
growing up, or after you grew up, you would go to people's homes for the
first time, and they would hear your name and they'd start bringing out the
old family photographs.
DICK: Yeah. I had that experience many times. Just, Monaco, oh, gotta
Page 47
show you something. The communion pictures, the wedding pictures. He
wasn't the only photographer in North Beach, but he was certainly the most
popular in his later years, from 1 920 on.
AUDREY: I had a friend once who talked about the negative aspects of
what he termed the "son of famous father syndrome". Were there any
negatives to being the grandson of a famous grandfather?
DICK: No, none whatsoever. You know, candidly, if I had to do it over
again, I probably would have chosen a different career than I did. But that's
got nothing to do with my feeling for my grandfather or for that matter for
my father. I adored 'em both.
AUDREY: You've described with a lot of tenderness the kindness of your
grandfather as you remember him. He was quite an old man when you were a
child, a man who'd been through so much, so much loss. Yet he didn't
become bitter.
DICK: And even in the old country. At least my grandfather had his
brother to come to here. But the conditions were so bad at home that they
couldn't even eat. I'm sure it's an exaggeration, but they say that things got
so bad they were eating the bark off the trees. The economy of that area in
Switzerland at that time was just terrible, no question about it. And you
know he had to struggle most of his life, but he did quite well. He was a very
kind man. A lot of this I got from my mother, who just absolutely adored
him. My recollections of him are that I loved him, but I was only 9 years old
when he died.
Page 48
Edna Calldhdn Mondco
AUDREY: How about your grandfather and your mother?
DICK: My grandfather and mother got along beautifully.
AUDREY: And he died in the house where your mother was -
DICK: My mother nursed him. On his deathbed. She's the one who took
care of him.
AUDREY: And she respected the fact that he wasn't Catholic?
DICK: My mother's family went to St. Francis of Assisi Church. They
certainly preferred it to St. Peter and Paul's, which was the Italian parish.
My mother was born on Telegraph Hill. She was born on Chestnut Street just
above Grant Avenue. At some point the family lived down on Taylor Street.
When my mother met my father she was living on Taylor Street, so they
lived right in the heart of North Beach. Taylor right off Columbus.
AUDREY: How did they meet?
DICK: That's when my father worked in the drugstore, and these
attractive Irish girls lived next door. He met her sister first but he only
wanted an introduction to my mother, and he met my mother through her
sister. Now see, my mother had a much rougher life as a child than my
father did. She was one of 1 2 kids. Ten of 'em survived into adulthood. She
only went through the sixth grade. Her mother was widowed at the time.
When she got through the sixth grade she had to go out and go to work as
did the other sisters. Except the youngest two didn't. She was fairly well
Page 50
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educated. Her English was good, and she had a good vocabulary.
AUDREY: Did she have an Irish brogue?
DICK: No. She was born here. As a matter of fact, so were both of
her parents. My mother went to the same schools as my father except that
my father went on to high school. And prior to that he went to the old
Cooper School -- 1 think I mentioned this to you before -- which used to be up
on Greenwich Street. It was where that little playground, Michelangelo
Playground, is now.
AUDREY: I wanted to ask you about that. At the time your parents went
to Sarah B. Cooper, it was located on Greenwich Street?
DICK: Yes. And by the time I went to Sarah B. Cooper they had
relocated it to Jones and Lombard.
[Note: The original school on Greenwich Street was destroyed in the fire of
1 906. A temporary wood frame building was erected on the site, which is
probably where Dick's parents attended. In 1 91 7 a new site for the
permanent Sarah B. Cooper School building was selected at Jones and
Lombard where Dick attended. In 1 983 the school was rebuilt and renamed
Yick Wo Alternative Elementary School, as it is known today.]
The first three grades were at Cooper at Jones and Lombard. And then
Hancock was around the corner on Filbert below Jones. I went to Hancock
from fourth through sixth grade. Hancock was an extension. They used to
call it Hancock-Cooper School for awhile. They had one principal, but they
Page 51
had two facilities so they could accommodate more kids easier by using the
two buildings. It was a unique arrangement, unusual at that time. And for
that matter, both my parents went to Hancock too.
[Note: The Hancock School building is now the Chinatown/North Beach City
College campus.]
And then the other thing, when you went to junior high school, if you lived in
the heart of North Beach, you went to Francisco Junior High, and if you lived
up on Russian Hill or in the Marina, you went to Marina Junior High. But if you
lived in the heart of North Beach and your parents raised enough hell about
it, you got to go to Marina. The prejudice at the time, candidly, was that
there were too many Chinese at Francisco.
AUDREY: And that was in the 40s when you were in junior high?
DICK: Yes, and there was an awful lot of anti-Chinese prejudice when I
grew up in North Beach. The Chinese could not move into a block anywhere
this side [north] of Broadway. There were a few Chinese at Marina Junior
High, but mostly the Chinese went to Francisco.
Then in high school, when I went to Galileo High School it was probably 40 per
cent Chinese, 40 per cent Italian, 4 or 5 per cent Jewish and one black, and
that was about it. I had pretty good Chinese friends at Galileo and they were
for the most part the good students. Galileo had one of the best records in
the City for people passing the English A test at Berkeley, and also for first
year performance at Berkeley, and it was all because of the Chinese. I mean,
the guys who fooled around like I did, well, I was not a very good student. I
Page 52
was fairly intelligent, but I was never a dedicated student.
When we went from grammar school to Marina Junior High, the school had
about 8 or 1 0 homerooms. So they put you in a homeroom on the basis of
your IQ and the kids in that homeroom all went to the same classes. Well,
unfortunately I had a fairly high IQ, and they put me in this class with all
these smart Jewish kids from the Marina and all these bright kids, and I had a
hell of a time. If I got B's I was just delighted, and I really worked, and then I
went to Galileo and got straight A's and really didn't do much. For some
reason it was so much easier to get a good grade at Galileo, and then when I
went to Berkeley I was in trouble again [laughs].
AUDREY: Last time we talked, you said that your birth certificate says
your first name is John.
DICK: Yes. That's the story I was going to tell you. As I mentioned
earlier, my family lived with my grandfather. They always wanted to call me
Richard. When I was born, that was the name in the hospital and that was
the name that they had down at the Board of Health where this stuff was
registered. At any rate, one day my grandfather came home with a very
sheepish look on his face. He had gone down and applied for a Change of
Name form, and he had filled it out as John Richard Louis Monaco.
You remember, Louis was his brother, whom he was really devoted to, the
guy who had brought him over from Switzerland. He asked my folks if that
would be all right. Well, they consented, and my name officially became John
Richard Louis, but I went all through the public school system as Richard.
Page 53
Okay, when I went to Cal, I said I gotta give 'em my real name. But then I just
started going by J.R., because nobody's ever called me John except when I
was in the Army. The Army was first name, middle initial, last name. So
some people whom I knew in the Army called me Dick. But a lot of people in
the Army called me John. •
AUDREY: And how old were you when your grandfather applied for this
change of name?
DICK: An infant.
AUDREY: And your mother agreed.
DICK: Oh, yeah. It was never a big deal. When I had to get my birth
certificate for some reason, and I went down to the old Health Department,
they couldn't find the thing. I said I know I was born in San Francisco in
1 928, December 27th. They couldn't find it. Then they went to what they
called an Amended Birth Certificate file, and there they found it.
AUDREY: Now, could you tell us a little bit about that piece of paper that
you said you found amongst family records?
DICK: Oh, yeah. You know how times change. We were reminiscing
earlier about the street peddlers and the economic conditions and so forth. I
just happened to come across this piece of paper the other day, and I
thought you might be interested in it. This is the hospital bill for when I was
born, the period from December 27th, 1 928, to January 7th, 1 929. Now
mind this, 11-1/2 days, not 1 2 days, because mother went in at noon, and
Page 54
/
E A. TRENKLE. Manager
SAN FRANCISCO,
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Formerly Adler Sanatorium
BROADWAY AND VAN NESS AVENUE
Telephone Craystone 1200
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.Board of Third Special Nurae.
.£<mrd of Fourth Special Nur«e-
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day» @ $ per day.
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_Operatinf Room. Service and .Materiala
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they only charged for half a day. And a special nurse. This was an around-
the-clock nurse for the whole time she was there, a special nurse, private
nurse. A dollar and fifty cents a day. Board and second special nurse for a
24-hour period, the same thing, a dollar and fifty cents a day. The
Interesting thing here is for the first one, it was $17.25, and for the second
one it was $1 6.50, so she didn't work quite as many hours. $15 for the
room. Anesthetic, this is an interesting one! Anesthetic $25 and gas and
oxygen on top of it, $10 more; $35 for that. 9 local telephone calls, 1 0
cents apiece, 90 cents. Total bill ~ now mind you, this is for 11-1/2 days in
the hospital, full time special nurse, the delivery room, the whole megillah ~
the total bill was $182.40.
It was the old Dante Hospital. Which became the Dante Sanatorium. Now it's
some sort of an old folks' home, on the [northeast] corner of Van Ness and
Broadway. You must picture it.
AUDREY: Yes. It is now called Notre Dame Apartments. Why do you
suppose your mother was in the hospital so long?
DICK: I suspect that that was not unusual in those days. They sure as
heck don't do it like that today. I recently had a grandchild, and the mother
had a cesarean and they kicked her out in a day and a half.
AUDREY: So you think that staying in the hospital for 1 2 days was
normal?
DICK: I think that even having a birth in the hospital in those days was
not particularly normal. I think it was usually a midwife at home. But at that
Page 55
price, why not?
AUDREY: How is it that your folks happened to keep that invoice? That's
fascinating, isn't it!
DICK: It was somewhere in this collection of stuff. I don't know how I
came across it. And I've shown it to many people. Of course, you know I tell
people the story that when I moved to Marin County, and this is almost 40
years ago, I built a house, and the lot cost me $6,500. And I built the house
and it's a good-sized house, for $26,000. So it was for less than $35,000
that I got into that. I mean you can't rent a garage for a year for $35,000
now. But you have to index for inflation and so on. So it's misleading.
AUDREY: But historically it's very interesting, what it says not only about
what the economy and what the prices were at different times, but whether
that was typical for women of that period, if they went to the hospital to
give birth, to stay for 1 2 days.
DICK: I know that my father was born in the home, in a rented flat.
Well, of course that was in 1 900.
AUDREY: Do you want to talk a little bit now about your father's business?
DICK: Well, let's see. As I've told you, during the Depression he got
into processing film, and he did it in the house there on Leavenworth Street.
When World War II broke out, they didn't manufacture film emulsions
anymore for commercial use. Everything went to defense industries and the
armed services. My father was an excellent mechanic, self-taught but really
Page 56
good. And there was no film business anymore. At any rate, one day this
friend of his wandered in, and he had a marine instrument with him. He said,
do you think you could fix this thing? My father had this shop in the house,
but he had never seen one in his life. He played around with it and in a day or
two had it fixed. So this was the beginning, and soon he had about 20 people
working around the clock, out of the basement of the house there.
This was at the beginning of the war. There were all these shipbuilding and
ship repair companies around San Francisco Bay, but they had to send the
marine instruments back to Philadelphia to have them repaired. There was
nobody in the western United States who did this then, and it would delay
getting the ships back out to sea for two or three months. When they
discovered that somebody could do it locally, immediately the business just
poured in. He kept hiring people and hiring people.
AUDREY: Did he actually seek the business, or did somebody just by chance
discover that he ~
DICK: Somebody asked. And they knew my father had a shop in the
house as well. As I told you it was a huge house, and the shop was
downstairs. When the house was originally built it was the maid's quarters.
That's where the business was when I first started in the business. But he
fixed the instrument, and in nothing flat he had a German machinist
associate and a bunch of people who all got involved. It just went full time.
He never stopped until after the war was over. That was the end of that
business. Then he didn't do anything for a year. But as you can tell, when
my father got into something he just went crazy over it. As I said before, he
was an extremely intelligent person.
Page 57
AUDREY: So he basically was In defense work during the war.
DICK: Yeah, that's right. And he wanted to stay out of the Army, too.
He always was sure they were going to draft him, but there was no way. I
mean, he had two kids and was almost 40 years old. But when the war
ended, what'd he do? He went into stamp collecting and really milked the
hobby. He did that for a year and nothing else. Then he went into the stock
market and lost all the money he had made. Charting stocks, you know, just
really getting into it. Then he decided he was going to go back to processing
film. This is around 1 946 or so when I was going to school.
After the year of losing money in the stock market he decided he had to
make a living again. He built a processing machine himself. This won't mean
much to the general public, but it was a continuous motion picture, 1 6-mm
motion picture processing machine. It took him probably the better part of a
year to build it. For the drive, believe it or not, he used an old washing
machine transmission. At any rate, he got it to work, and it was a very
fortuitous time. I guess I had mentioned before that prior to the war and the
time that he was doing this marine instrument repair work, he did process
film, but he did it by the old rack-and-tank method.
AUDREY: What is that?
DICK: That's where you manually load a rack in the dark. You manually
load a rack with film and then you put it in a succession of tanks. You put it
first In the developer tank, and then you take it out of that, and then put it
in a wash tank. And you take it out of that and then put it into a fix tank.
Page 58
That completes the processing staging, but then you have to dry the film
afterwards. And he had built a huge drying drum, actually half the size of
this room. Probably the length of this room, 25 feet or something like that,
and maybe 1 0, 1 5 feet deep. And they would string the film onto this big
drying drum with elastic bands between each roll, each roll of film. That's
because as film is processed, as it goes through the solutions, it stretches,
and then when it dries it goes back to its original length. So in order to
compensate for the film as it shrank, they put these rubber bands between
the rolls of film, and that worked. I mean, that's so archaic.
AUDREY: And what is the rack?
DICK: How can I describe a rack? You know, I can visualize it, but to
describe it, it's a rectangular frame with spools horizontally on the bottom
and spools horizontally on the top. The film is just loaded from top to
bottom over the spools. And that was dipped into the solutions. That was
the way they used to do it, way, way back.
AUDREY: Well, as long as you've returned to that, you just mentioned
briefly before that he processed motion picture film during the '30s, and one
of the questions that occurred to me was, who were his clientele?
DICK: Okay. During the Depression, with this rack and tank method he
could process 8-mm, 1 6-mm, and 35-mm — 35 being the widest and 1 6
in-between and 8 very thin. And 8 was a very amateur emulsion just used
for amateur purposes. During those years he made a living processing
amateur film. He had a delivery boy who went downtown to all of the stores
and picked up the film and brought it back. My father charged something like
Page 59
Danie Monaco, circa 19Jb
35 cents for processing orthochromatic film and 50 cents for processing
panchromatic film. The only difference was that the panchromatic film had
to be handled completely in the dark and the orthochromatic film could be
handled with a safelight.
AUDREY: Was it home movies?
DICK: Yeah, that was home movies. And that was the bulk of his
business. But then he did some processing for studios in town and, you
know, stuff like when the bridges were being built. He processed a lot of
that film. I was just a little kid. So it's difficult for me to tell you exactly
who the clientele were.
AUDREY: Do you know who taught him how to do that?
DICK: He taught himself. If my father got interested in something, he
was brilliant. He really was. He also was very good mechanically.
AUDREY: Do you think he got interested in processing film as an extension
of what his father did? Did he work with his father at all?
DICK: No. The two businesses were never affiliated. He got into the
business when 1 6-mm came out in the late 1 920s, and he also took pictures.
But this is the way he made his living, processing film at that time.
AUDREY: Was he a still photographer as well?
DICK: Well, he played around with that, but the main thrust of
Page 60
AUDREY: Where do you suppose your father got this passion for
education and inventiveness?
DICK: Well it's innate, I guess. And certainly his ability to invent stuff
and his mechanical ability -- he was born with that. And I'm positive that his
family stressed education.
AUDREY: I've seen some of the photos your grandfather took of your dad
with his mother. And they're very touching. I wonder if they were especially
close and if it was she who instilled in him that love of education. Do you
have any idea what his relationship with his mother was like?
DICK: Not near as much as I do with his father, because his mother died
when he was 1 9 years old or so. My mother never knew his mother,
although my mother knew and adored his father. No, I don't. The only
impression I have of his mother is that I knew her sister as a boy growing up.
And I assume that they were the same. She was very old-fashioned, I would
say, and a housewife. Really, that's all I can tell you about her because I
never knew her. My father didn't talk about her a heck of a lot, so I just
really don't know.
AUDREY: I digressed. We were talking about your father's work with
motion picture film.
DICK: It was an opportune time. The advent of television was just
about the same time. And when he started out he had a couple of good
clients. W, A. Palmer Films here in San Francisco was his best account. But
television came along, and the newsreel thing started. This is when I started
Page 62
in the business in the basement of the house. That was 1955. We did the
first local news show. It was Shell News with Bill Bradley. We processed
their film. At one time we were doing KPIX's and KGO's and KQED's and all
the CBS film that came into the Bay area. And that was news film, and it
generated a lot of work. So he got into it at a really good time. That worked
out very nicely.
AUDREY: And you started working with him after you graduated from
college?
DICK: I graduated from college and was drafted. When I got out of the
Army, he said, can you help me out for a month or two? And I said yes. That
was 45 years ago. And I'm still — well, I'm not working. I pretend to work
now.
AUDREY: So is the business that you have here an extension of what
started in 1955?
DICK: That's right. And I never would have stayed with the business if
it had stayed in the basement of the house. Within a year and a half we
moved to Columbus Avenue. 950 Columbus Avenue at the corner of
Chestnut. We rented space there, which was not enough space. It's just
amazing the amount of equipment that we put into it. I think the area was
about 4,000 feet, and we put mezzanines throughout a good deal of the
place, and got up to about 6,000 feet. But then later I looked for a building.
I figured south of Market was the place to be because it was certainly
industrial at that time, and I found this building that we're sitting in here.
Page 63
AUDREY: What year was that?
DICK: 1975. I bought this building early in 1975. My father died in
December of 1 975. In fact, he was in this building only one time. When we
bought the building, it was just an old warehouse. All the improvements that
were made, we made ourselves over the years.
AUDREY: Was he pretty much retired by the time he died?
DICK: He never retired. But he died of cancer, and he was very ill for
the last year. I don't know how to say this, but he was always heckling me or
always telling me what I was doing wrong.
AUDREY: So you basically worked together for 20 years, every day In the
same business. What was that like?
DICK: We fought like crazy. Fought every day. [Laughs]. King
Harrington, who was a client of ours at that time, walked in one day, and the
old man and I were having it out in the front office, screaming at one other.
King Harrington got embarrassed as hell. He was with somebody else, and
they walked out of the place and went to lunch across the street. Half an
hour later my father and I walked into the place to have lunch together
[laughs]. I mean, this went on, and you know what? We never fought except
when we got involved in the business together.
AUDREY: Was it about technical stuff?
DICK: It was about everything. I don't like to go into this too much, but
Page 64
as he got older he did not have as much self-confidence as he had before, so
he criticized me all the time. No matter what I did, he would find out what
was wrong with it, or tell me what was wrong with it. Occasionally he was
right, but most of the time he wasn't.
AUDREY: Hmm. That must have been hard for you.
DICK:
another.
It wasn't easy. But there's no question that we loved one
AUDREY: So after the fights, it'd be over, and It'd be fine.
DICK: Oh yeah, we'd have a hell of a fight. And then there was the
awkward period for an hour or so, who would talk to the other first.
AUDREY: Do you know what your father's relationship with his father was
like?
DICK:
Oh, he adored his father.
AUDREY: Did they also fight?
DICK: You know, not much. I saw the interplay between the two of 'em
because I guess I was just about 1 0 years old when my grandfather died.
And my grandfather was all thumbs mechanically. One incident I remember.
My grandfather was probably about 79, 80 years old, and he decided to put
up shelves in the closet of his bedroom, and my father said. Dad, you can't
do that. Because he was just putting the screws into the plaster and wasn't
Page 65
catching the studs behind [laughs]. My grandfather was stubborn and
wanted to do it his way, and so my father just wall<ed away. The shelves held
up until after my grandfather died [laughs]. But as I say, although my
grandfather was not good mechanically at all, he loved to paint. He could
work in any medium.
AUDREY: So he was an artist in the full sense of the word.
DICK: He called himself an artist. He always advertised himself as a
photographer and artist, and he did a lot of beautiful portrait work. As a
matter of fact I was at a friend's home last night, and he's got about five of
my grandfather's oils hanging there. At home my whole hall is decorated
with pen and inks that he did, and I have three or four of his oils. When I
think about it now, I've got a whole room downstairs with a lot of his stuff on
the wall, you know, prints that I've made of his work, plus quite a bit of his
original work, too.
AUDREY: Did your grandfather ever sell his artwork or did he do it for
himself?
DICK: No. He did it for himself and gave it to friends. It was a hobby.
And I still remember when he retired and lost his studio, he set up his easel
down in the basement where the processing machine went eventually. He had
to be 79 years old at that time. God, I'm digressing here. He had an old
wood-burning stove in there that he gave to friends of ours. This is the
same family I've talked about, but it was the father. Dr. Ertola. He was a
dentist in North Beach. Charlie Ertola. He was a Masonic brother of my
grandfather's. And my grandfather was responsible for his buying the house
Page 66
around the corner from us when Charlie first got married. He was looking
for a place to live, and my grandfather told him about that. So they moved
in there, and the Ertola family still owns that property on Francisco Street.
Lynn and I had dinner with Chad and Beryl Ertola recently.
AUDREY: And they're the ones who have the paintings?
DICK: Chad Ertola is the one who has the paintings, and his brother
Jack also has some. But again, getting back to the stove. Some time ago,
Chad said, "You know I've got this old stove that your father gave my father
in the 1930s probably. They used it all the time. I think you should have it.
You know, you can put it out in the back yard or something." Well, I wasn't
really too enthusiastic about it. But I said, well, I'll take a look at it. When I
looked at it, I saw that it was just full of soot and oil and so forth. But
anyhow, we loaded it into the back of my car, and I took it home. My wife
wondered, I think, what the hell condition this thing is in. But she did kinda
like it. Anyhow, to make a long story short, I took about a month
refurbishing that thing, taking it completely apart and refinishing it.
And then we didn't know where to put it. Believe it or not, it couldn't be used
anymore because the pot was cracked and it couldn't be welded. It was cast
iron. Anyhow, we ended up putting it in the bedroom, and it made a beautiful
little piece with books on top of it. And now it is featured in our condo on
Telegraph Hill.
AUDREY: Describe it for me. Is it a pot bellied stove?
DICK: No, it's not quite pot bellied. It's got a flat top and about four
Page 67
stove lids that go on the top.
AUDREY: So it was for cooking?
DICK: Well yeah, you could do anything you wanted with it. Chad Ertola
used it just to heat the room down there.
AUDREY: And that's what your grandfather used it for?
DICK: That's right. In the house on Leavenworth Street. When he
retired he had his easel down there in the basement studio and used the
stove to keep himself warm.
You know, the only time I ever saw my grandfather lose it -- oh no, two
times. One time my brother and I turned the hose on him in the garden, you
know, sneaked up on him from behind and turned the hose on him. He pointed
to the house and said, "Go home, go home." The other time happened in
what was originally the dining room and somewhere along the line became the
pool room. At the time I was probably 7, my brother maybe was 5 and Chad
Ertola 6. My grandfather had this beautiful oil painting of two lions up on the
wall, and my brother said, "I don't like those lions." And he took the pool cue
and poked a hole through it [laughs]. And my grandfather was not very
happy about that. But I'll be darned if he didn't patch the canvas and repaint
it, and it looked like it hadn't been damaged when he was through with it.
AUDREY: [Laugh] That's a wonderful story. I can just see a 5 year old kid
being scared of those lions. "I don't like those!" What other childhood
memories of him do you have?
Page 68
DICK: I remember the drawing lessons he gave me. As I said,
sketching and oil painting were a hobby and passion all of his life. We still
have a lot of his collection that goes back to the early Nevada days and one
or two from Switzerland where as a child he made his own pigments out of
crushed brick, egg yolk, charcoal and whatever else was available. One of
these paintings is on display at the North Beach Museum. But to get back to
the drawing lessons, I was not very good at it. My younger brother Bob was
much better.
He didn't have much luck with teaching me Italian either. He did manage to
teach me a a couple of words, but I guess I wasn't too interested at the
time. Since neither my mother nor father spoke Italian all the conversation
in the house was in English.
One other recollection is playing checkers with him. As I recall I beat him
from time to time, but in retrospect I am sure that was because he let me. I
remember as a very little kid awaiting his arrival home from work. As he got
older he didn't care to negotiate the hills. So in the morning he would walk
down Francisco Street and take the F car down Columbus. When he came
home in the afternoon he would take the E car to Union and Leavenworth and
walk down Leavenworth. He always picked up some sort of a small gift, a
candy bar or something like that, for my brother and myself. When my
brother was diagnosed with diabetes at a very early age my grandfather
could no longer bring us sweets, but there was almost always some sort of
trinket.
One of my most poignant memories was the day he died, Christmas day
Page 69
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1 938. I was old enough to realize that he was seriously ill although there
was no discussion with our parents about his impending death. Traditionally,
Christmas dinner was always celebrated at our house, but that year my
brother and I were picked up and delivered to my aunt's house. During the
course of the afternoon there were several phone calls back and forth, and
although nothing was discussed with us I had a pretty good idea that
something was going on. As soon as I got home I went immediately to my
grandfather's room. It was empty. I knew what had happened and went
silent. My brother who was two years younger than I wanted me to play with
him and I started to cry. This happened sixty-seven years ago but it is still
vivid in my memory.
AUDREY: I'm looking at this photo portrait of your grandfather. What a
handsome, dapper man he was. That must have been when he was quite
young.
DICK: Probably in his 40s.
AUDREY: And you didn't know him until he was in his seventies.
DICK: That's right. He was probably the age I am now, when I was born.
AUDREY: Did he retain that style as an older gentleman?
DICK: Yes. He always dressed very properly. Always wore a collar and
a tie, always wore a hat. Very erect in his posture. Had a full head of hair
until the day he died. Much more hair than I have. He also liked to take
pictures of himself, I guess when business was bad, because I've got
Page 70
hundreds of pictures of him in every pose you could imagine.
AUDREY: Was he a tall man?
DICK: No. He was probably 5' 8", 5' 9", something like that. I suppose
that was relatively tall for those times.
AUDREY: And did he have any particular gestures or sayings that you can
think of?
DICK: No. I never heard my grandfather swear. I heard my father
swear once or twice. My mother always said my problem was that the Army
ruined me. But I swore long before I got into the Army. I told you the story
about my grandfather's dentures, didn't I? He smoked a cigar. And when he
first got his dentures, he had a hell of a time keeping the cigar in his mouth.
So he took the dentures out. He put them in a vice, took a file and cut a
moon-shaped hole in the back of the dentures, and it held his cigar very
nicely. True story [laughs].
He was practical if nothing else. Oh, his eating habits. He never ate dinner
with us except on weekends. My mother's family would visit us on weekends,
and I think we had leg of lamb every Saturday night. But he ate lunch out
every day.
AUDREY: Where?
DICK: At Three Little Swiss, I think it was on Broadway. Or a couple of
other restaurants in North Beach, Fior d'ltalia for one. On his wife's side, he
Page 71
had relatives who were involved in Fior d'ltalia. But as I mentioned earlier,
he'd make his own breakfast every morning and his own dinner every night.
Polenta and cheese. And he was thin as a rail, absolutely thin. My father
was not. My father was more or less like I am. In fact, my father was even
heavier than I am.
AUDREY: There's another question I wanted to ask. You talked earlier
about stereoscopics. Could you describe that? There must be a lot of folks
who don't know what that is.
DICK: Let me show you. These are stereoscopics. It's a process in
which you take a picture with two lenses slightly offset. Then you mount the
two images side by side. And when you look at 'em through a stereoscopic
viewer, it gives the illusion of depth to the pictures.
AUDREY: I see. It's a little bit larger than the size of a postcard on some
fairly heavy cardboard. And there are what look like identical images of a
street scene. This goes into some kind of a viewer?
DICK: That's right. A slide viewer. It has a hood on it and two lenses
that you look through at the picture, which is held only three or four inches
from the actual viewing place. And as I say, it gives the illusion of depth
when you see the picture. This is how the photographic history of Nevada
that I have was salvaged. It was on these stereoscopics. Viewing
stereoscopics was a form of entertainment in those days. So these images
were all in the home on Leavenworth that did not burn down.
AUDREY: When you looked through the viewer, did you see one image or
Page 72
did you see two?
DICK: You saw one image with the illusion of depth. Let me tell you a
story. My grandfather had taken some in the Palace Hotel and there were
people in it. When I was a little kid, he used to show me. He treated this
stereoscopic viewer very gently, but he showed them to me and all of a
sudden it looked like it was real. You know, it had depth and so on. It really
scared me. I remember that. Instead of looking at a one dimensional image,
it was three-dimensional. It looked real.
AUDREY: Somehow or other the lenses in the viewer merged the two
images?
DICK: That's right. Two images became one with depth.
AUDREY: You mentioned that your grandfather was a Mason. Could you
describe what the Masons are?
DICK: I'm not a Mason, and I really don't know that much about it. It's
funny. The family came over from the old country. He had a sister who was
a nun. I presume the family was religious. My grandfather and his brother
and the other brother who came to this country had no use for the church
whatsoever. They were all educated and influenced by a man they referred
to as "Maestro". According to my grandfather, in Ticino the church treated
them poorly. I guess they were looking for some sort of affiliation when they
came to this country and became Masons. But I know nothing about Masonry
personally. I think that they used it as a substitute for church, and it does
have religious significance. It used to be that the church had no use for the
Page 73
Masonic order and vice versa. But I just saw an obituary of somebody I knew
in the paper last week, and he was a Mason and had a Catholic burial, so I
guess there's been more of an accommodation made in recent years.
I was talking to a friend about that last night, and he said, "You know what?
That's usually the wife, after the guy's dead, she has a Catholic burial." But
I know nothing about the relative merits of whatever went on between the
Catholic church and the Masons.
AUDREY: When you were growing up, did you have any idea that your
grandfather had left this incredible legacy?
DICK: Absolutely not. Even when I was 1 8 years old, when I first saw
the photos, I didn't have a clue what impact it could have. I had no feeling for
history or for that matter, for family history. I knew my grandfather was
from Switzerland. I didn't know where specifically. I didn't know anything
about the geography of Italy. Having an Irish mother and a Swiss-Italian
father, I grew up in a different environment than most of the kids I went to
school with.
AUDREY: Yes, you talked about that before, and I wanted to ask you more
about that. You said you were different because your folks spoke English.
Your father was not a garbage man or a fisherman. He was a photographer.
You didn't go to church. And you had to wear short pants until you were in
third grade [laughs].
DICK: That's right. So did Roy Calcagno, though. And his father was a
garbage man.
Page 74
AUDREY: And you lived in a big house. And you were viewed as well-to-do,
although ~
DICK: Although we were absolutely broke.
AUDREY: Do you have any sense that this early experience of being the
odd guy had an impact on you that you can see?
DICK: Undoubtedly it did. I couldn't tell you specifically, but I certainly
was aware that I was different. I think I told you, it made me very nervous
that I didn't go to church and all the other kids were going to church, and my
mother had been a devout Catholic at one time. But she sort of lost interest
in it too. But as she grew older, you couldn't find a more saintly woman than
she was. At the end, my wife took her to church every Sunday. I think my
mother would go just to go out, to go some place, but she saw the priest.
This was at my instigation, mind you, and as I told you, I'm not a very
religious person, but she took confession for the first time in 50 years.
And I said, what in the world did he ask you? I don't know. It amounted to
nothing and was painless, I guess. I don't think she had a sin to confess
except that she had harassed my father a little. She was probably 85 at
that time. She was 87 when she died.
AUDREY: When you got married did you and your wife live with your folks
in the house on Leavenworth Street?
DICK: No. I did not care for the house. I wish I had kept it, mind you.
Page 75
after my dad died. But we sold it then, and I would bet you that place has
gotta be worth a lot today. Now there's been a lot of renovation done. It's a
huge, huge home with five or six fireplaces and —
AUDREY: I know. I drove past it, and it's beautiful.
DICK: Well, take a look at it from the back, because it's five stories in
the back. You see two stories on Leavenworth. But if you go back to the art
school, up to the roof terrace, and turn around and look west, you can see
how large the house is. There are five stories including the little penthouse.
After my father died, my mother tried to stay there, and I wanted in the
worst way to get her out of the house. There were a couple of break-in
incidents. Finally I talked her into buying a condominium in Marin, quite close
to where we were, and it was very nice for her and convenient for us. So she
lived there for the last 11 or 1 2 years of her life. She ended up in a rest
home eventually.
AUDREY: So then when you moved her out, that's when you sold the
house?
DICK: That's right. We got $248,000 for it. The house was on the
market probably for a year. I remember at first I didn't want to part with it.
I thought, well, let's try and rent it. I was asking $600 a month rent but
couldn't get it. That was around 1 976. That's the story of 2434
Leavenworth.
AUDREY: Well it certainly holds a lot of history. And, even though you
Page 76
didn't particularly like the house, the sound of your voice would indicate some
nostalgia.
One of the things I wanted to ask you about was your proximity to the Art
Institute growing up.
DICK: That was our playground. That's before they did the annex on
the north side of the property. That was a great place to play.
AUDREY: Was it an empty lot?
DICK: No, there were beautiful poplar trees, and it was walled. That
concrete wall that still exists was around it. I believe it was built in 1 927.
But the other story was about when they put up that annex sometime in the
60s. We had a hell of a row with the art school and the people involved.
They were actually building it completely contrary to the plans that had been
submitted. We went before the Planning Commission and stopped them. It
was all over the newspapers. They wanted the cafeteria side to go much
higher. As it is, it took a fair amount of view away from all of those
properties on Leavenworth Street. In our house it would have blocked all of
the view from downstairs. It was a big cause celebre. But there was no
question that they were not adhering to the plans. They asked for a
variance on stuff that they had already started, and so on. And they were
stopped dead.
But what they had already put up, which also was not according to the
original plans, they let them keep. But with stuff that they were going to do
later they actually had to pull down the scaffolding and finish it off
Page 77
differently. So it didn't go near as high as they wanted it to. The architect
was a renowned British architect. But the annex is so inconsistent with the
architecture of the original building, it looks like two entirely different
entities. I think it's ridiculous. The amphitheater up there does have a
gorgeous view, though.
AUDREY: So the addition was built on the site of what had once been the
school's garden?
DICK: Yes. That's where we played as kids. We used to hop the wall
and play forts over there. And a lot of the student artists lived in the
neighborhood, in the old shacks down on Columbus and Jones. Some of the
instructors were neighbors of ours. Ruth Wakefield, who went by the name
of Ruth Cravath eventually. She was divorced and went back to her maiden
name. She was a close friend of ours. She lived next door for awhile, and I
grew up with her kids, Sam and Beth Wakefield. Otis Oldfield was another one
who was there. Bob Howard, who was married to Adaline Kent was there.
And in later days, Ansel Adams was running around the place all the time.
AUDREY: So growing up, you had exposure to a lot of important artists in
San Francisco.
DICK: Well, I didn't really know them. I saw them. But the first job I
ever had was as an assistant to the janitor over there, 50 cents an hour.
I was 11, 12, something like that. My friends all tried to get me to sneak
them in so they could see the nude models.
You know, I'm thinking about that neighborhood and how it was so different in
Page 78
those days. I mean, you look at the congestion and the traffic around there
now, that close to Fisherman's Wharf and The Zigzag as we called it -- the
crooked street on Lombard between Hyde and Leavenworth. As I told you
earlier, we used to play ball on the street on Leavenworth, and whenever a
car came along we'd be upset because they were interfering with our
baseball game or our football game. For playing ball there was a relatively
flat part of Leavenworth between Chestnut and Francisco. Leavenworth was
all cobblestones then, including the hill part. And for roller skating we used
to start all the way at the top of the hill, on Union Street, on roller skates,
and have somebody stationed at each block, and we'd have races coming all
the way down [laughs].
AUDREY: On the cobblestones?
DICK: Oh, yeah. And then Francisco between Leavenworth and Jones
was cobblestones ail the way down, down to Jones.
AUDREY: That's pretty steep.
DICK: It's relatively steep, sure. That's the way they paved it originally
— with cobblestones — and bricks, too.
AUDREY: And you roller skated on that?
DICK: That's right. I was in my house in Marin when they finally pulled
up the cobblestones on Leavenworth Street. Now I've been in Marin for
almost 40 years. So it's 40 years since the cobblestones were taken out.
When they were being removed I went over there and got a collection of them
Page 79
and built some walls in my home with the cobblestones from Leavenworth
Street.
AUDREY: Fabulous! You now have footprints of your childhood in your
home. How many of us can experience that? I read somewhere that the
traffic signals were different then. Tell me about the traffic signals.
DICK: Let's see, how do I describe it? There was a signal on a post.
And there was some sort of a mechanical device that triggered the change
from green to red and back. The signals were vertical, and they had two
placards within. The stop sign was white on red and the go sign was white on
green. Boy, that's a long time ago. And there used to be fire alarms on
every other block or so. If there was a fire, you broke the glass and pulled
the little wire in it to get the fire engines to come. I guess they had a
system for tracking where the alarm was pulled, and they'd send somebody
out there.
AUDREY: That was probably before every family had a telephone.
DICK: That's correct. I remember, of course, the early telephones.
When I first used a telephone, you spoke to the operator when you called a
number. I remember my aunt's number was MOntrose 10224, and I used to
imitate the operator because the operator repeated what you said. I still
remember Ertola's phone number — GRaystone 3272. This is going on 75
years ago. Ours was GRaystone 5468. It was that simple. I can't
remember a phone number today to save my life. I know about six or seven
phone numbers, and that's it. Sometime ago, of course, they replaced the
first two letters of the exchange, as we called it, with numbers, so there are
Page 80
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even more numbers to remember.
AUDREY: We were talking about the old traffic lights. You said it was a
mechanical device. Was it like an arm that went out? Or a light?
DICK: No, it wasn't a light. My memory is vague, but the box was
yellow, as I recall, and inside the box there was something that on a red
background had "stop" lettered in white, and "go" lettered on a green
background. And it somehow flipped from one to the other. How that was
driven I have no idea. And obviously there was no attention paid to how
much congestion there was or how far the traffic was backed up. Of course
traffic was never backed up in those days [laughs]. There weren't enough
cars.
AUDREY: How big was the box?
DICK: Maybe 18 inches. Just a guess. I'm recalling something from
probably 60 years ago, and I'm not sure how accurate I am. But that's my
impression of the way it looked.
AUDREY: If they weren't lit, how could you see them at night?
DICK: You had to be able to, didn't you, so there must have been a light
in it, somehow. I don't know how it worked.
AUDREY: Were they on every street corner or just on the main
streets?
Page 81
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DICK: Not near as many as you see now. There were no stop signs
along Bay Street, for instance. Hell, when I learned to drive in 1 947 or '48,
down toward Fisherman's Wharf, there were no cars there at all. That was
all lumberyards and vacant lots. All that gorgeous property. That was just
completely undeveloped property when I was a kid. I have hundreds of
pictures of that area -- photos of several of these things that we've talked
about.
AUDREY: Let's talk about family outings again. You mentioned going out in
the car to see the Christmas lights.
DICK: And when we came home, my grandfather had the warm bricks
for us and the chestnuts roasting in the fireplace.
AUDREY: And I wondered if there were any other kind of family outings.
For example, did you ever go to the amusement park out at the ocean?
DICK: No, not with my parents. Sure I was out there as a kid, with
friends. First date I ever had, we ended up out there, when I was in junior
high school.
AUDREY: What was it like? Can you describe it?
DICK: Oh, I don't know, the place was kind of tawdry, actually. It was
called Playland at the Beach. I remember the big fat lady with this terrible
laugh. It was a mechanical woman. And of course at that age, 1 3 or 1 4, we
used to love the place where they had air jets in the floor that blew the
women's skirts up over their heads, you know. That was great. They also
Page 82
had good hot dogs and those bumper cars. We used to drive around and bang
into one another. Oh, there was a big slide there too, as I recall.
AUDREY: How'd you get out there?
•
DICK: Streetcar. Don't even remember the street. We went
everywhere on the streetcar, until the time we learned to drive. I was a little
later than most. A couple of kids had cars in high school. I was probably 1 7
before I learned to drive. But we went everywhere on streetcars. I haven't
been on a streetcar in 30 years now. There were two companies: The Muni
and the Market Street Railway.
The Market Street Railroad was privately owned, and the other one was Muni.
The Muni eventually bought out Market Street. There was competition
between them, but they went to different places. I remember going to
football games at Kezar Stadium when I was in high school. I don't recall
what car it was, but it went through the tunnel out there. That's a long time
ago. And of course I remember riding the cable cars. My mother used to call
them "the dinkies."
[In a recent TV interview, Carol Channing, the famous performer who grew up
in San Francisco, also referred to the cable cars as "dinkies".]
As I mentioned, when I was a kid, my family was unusual. We had an
automobile. Most of the people in the neighborhood didn't have a car. There
were very few garages in houses at that time. Just looking up and down the
street, as I recall, after Dr. Ford passed away, I think we were the only house
on that side of Leavenworth Street that had a car. And then around the
Page 83
corner, Ertolas always had a car, and Verga did too. This is going bacl< into
the 1930s.
AUDREY: What are your memories of Washington Square?
t
DICK: Well to tell you, right off the bat, I remember Wendell Wilkie
making his speech there when he ran against Roosevelt in 1 940. My father
was a big Republican, so I was out there cheering for Wendell Wilkie. And I
remember when Joe DiMaggio got married there, not to Marilyn [Monroe], but
what was her name? Dorothy Arnold, his first wife. They really decorated
the front of the church [Sts. Peter and Paul] for that wedding. They hung
green awning in front of it. I recall that. I think I told you before, we didn't
hang out much in that part of North Beach. We were on Russian Hill, and we
played around there, so I don't have a lot of recollection of the park.
I didn't belong, but I used to go up to the Salesian Boys' Club from time to
time with friends of mine. In those days, that was in the basement of the
church. We used to play basketball there with a ceiling not much higher than
this ceiling, probably 1 0 or 1 1 feet. I remember Fusco, who was the director
down there. He let me have it one time because I called him Mr. Fusco.
When I first met him, everybody called him Fusco. I couldn't address an elder
or a director by just his last name. So I called him Mr, Fusco. He didn't like
that, and he said, "Everybody else calls me Fusco. Why don't you call me
Fusco?" I was probably the only one who was afraid to call him Fusco. I
didn't know him that well. He knew I didn't go to church. Maybe he thought I
was addressing him very formally, putting him off or something, but that had
nothing to do with it. That's just the way I was taught -- to address adults
as Mr. or Mrs. or Miss. But everybody else called him Fusco to his face. He
Page 84
did a heck of a lot for the North Beach community and the kids in North
Beach. And the Salesian Boys' Club has been wonderful. A boys' and girls'
club now. It was a boys' club when I was a kid. It's been responsible for a hell
of a lot of kids going on and getting further education. Has been and still is a
really good institution.
AUDREY: I've heard that from so many narrators. We're lucky to have it
here in our neighborhood. Can you tell me more about jumping over the wall
of the Art Institute and playing in the garden?
DICK: We set it on fire one time. Dry grass, you know, and I think we
wanted to make a horseshoe court. Gee, I hope the cops don't come and get
me now [laughs]. We wanted to make a horseshoe area. So we said, we'll do
a controlled burn. We started the fire, and we had people stand around to
put it out. All of a sudden it went whoosh. Over the wall we went, running
away, and the fire department came and put it out, no problem.
AUDREY: What was the garden like then?
DICK: It was unkempt.
AUDREY: So it was perfect for kids.
DICK: Yeah. It had these beautiful poplar trees. From the Francisco
Street entrance to the garden there was a path that led up to the cafeteria,
and there were poplar trees on either side of that. On the far side, the west
side, sculptors used to do their work, so there wasn't as much grass there.
In the other area down below, it was just wild grass that they cut down every
Page 85
year. We burned it down for them that one time!
AUDREY: And the entrance, you say, was on Francisco Street?
DICK: Yes, but the main entrance was on Chestnut Street, as it is
today.
AUDREY: So you snuck in the bacl<.
DICK: Yes, we used to go over the wall on Francisco Street. Bret Harte
Terrace is just across the street. Well, that was a dirt road then. I saw the
building of every home that's in there. There was a school teacher, Miss Bell,
and she taught at Polytechnic High School. She had the first house in there.
She didn't like us, and we didn't like her. Our gang got into a lot of trouble,
and I was always scared to death and just observing, not participating. Then
when the cops would come after us, I'd hide under the bed. I told you the
story about when Ertola shot the .22 at the bird on the fence, and the bullet
lodged in the wall of a house up on Chestnut Street. Tell you another Jack
Ertola incident. I don't know whether I should be telling these stories, but
they're funny. Jack Ertola was always an aggressive kid.
AUDREY: Was he sort of the ringleader?
DICK: No, he wasn't necessarily the ringleader. He was just the older
kid. But he was always aggressive and very self confident. And he brought a
friend home from junior high school one time, and we were all playing down
there, and they started something that upset the police. Old Lady Bell, we
used to call her, the school teacher, called the police. Jack was in his house.
Page 86
The police came along, and these were the old San Francisco cops, Irish guys.
They were the nicest guys in the world. They were giving this kid a lecture,
and Jack comes charging out of the house and tells the cop, you can't do this
to my friend. The cops just go, "Get in the car," and so they got in the car.
AUDREY: What had the kid done?
DICK: Thrown a tomato or something like that. I don't know. It was no
big deal. So Chad. Jack's younger brother, goes running home and tells their
mother, "The police arrested Jack", and his mother got very upset, you
know. And then the father comes home and they tell the father the story,
and the father got a big charge out of it. He knew exactly what had
happened. What had happened was, they got to the police station and the
cops said, "Get out of the car, you wise guys, and walk back home." And that
was that story.
AUDREY: Do you remember any of the policemen?
DICK: No, not specifically. Oh, I do remember one, Louis De Mattel, the
guy who caught the bomber that was bombing St. Peter and Paul's. The one
who gave us rides on the running board and let us blow the siren. He was a
detective, though, not a patrolman.
AUDREY: One of the things I wanted to ask you about were neighborhood
characters or eccentric, crabby people who didn't like kids. You just told me
about "old lady Bell". Any others?
DICK: [Laughs]. Yes, and Mrs. Ford next door to us. She was difficult.
Page 87
Then the Carlisles across the street. They weren't difficult, but they were
very protective of their property. We had some difficulties, but they
weren't bad people.
AUDREY: Do you remember any stories that your grandfather may have told
or that were handed down about coming to America?
DICK: You know, I've done a lot of research on that. I don't recall his
telling us stories. But I've got letters that the brother, Louis Monaco, wrote
home, detailing his stay in New York and his early days in San Francisco. Also
working in a mine, and eventually going up to Virginia City. In a boarding
house he met a man who was a dentist and photographer. And we surmise
that that's where he got interested in photography.
He opened a little studio in Virginia City in 1 869. Six months to a year later
he moved to Eureka, Nevada. I've got all kinds of documentation on Louis
Monaco and letters he wrote home to Switzerland, all about the politics of
Italy and what was going on there. Because they were just so interested in
all of this. You know, the unification of Italy. His heroes were Napoleon and
Garibaldi. I've got a lot on that.
AUDREY: And those letters were all preserved, obviously.
DICK: Yes. I got them from a cousin of mine and had them translated.
And from what I'm told by the woman who translated them, they're well
written. They give you some idea of their political outlook at that time. And
the anti-church thing and the anti-Vatican thing. All this history I really
wasn't particularly interested in. I got kind of interested in history after I
Page 88
read this stuff.
AUDREY: Well, it's a treasure trove, because it seems that most folks,
once they got here, didn't tell their children much about the experience of
crossing — the actual process of deciding to leave Italy and what that was
like, and how they felt.
DICK: I have no recollection of my grandfather ever talking to me about
any of that.
AUDREY: Yes. This reluctance to talk about the old country and the
emigration process seems to be a common thread among the parents and
grandparents of all the narrators who have contributed their stories to this
project. So the fact that Louis' letters to Switzerland have been preserved
is important historically.
DICK: Yeah. But none of them are from my grandfather. These are
from his older brother, who came over 1 5 years or so before my
grandfather did.
AUDREY: Getting back to your mother, did she have any special home
remedies?
DICK: No, I don't think so. She probably did. I just don't recall. I've
told you about my family life, and my brother being born diabetic. That had
a great influence on our whole household. I don't remember anything
specific in the way of home remedies.
Page 89
AUDREY: Despite the fact that you had to wear short pants to school, it
seems, from your stories, that you had a fairly normal childhood playing in
the streets, having friends and getting into a little trouble, running around
and roller skating.
DICK: I didn't stay home. I'd just say, I would describe myself as more
timid than most of the kids were.
AUDREY: But still you had a fairly outdoorsy life.
DICK: Yeah, we did absolutely everything. I played many hours of
baseball at North Beach Playground.
AUDREY: And your younger brother, because he was sickly, couldn't do any
of this?
DICK: Well he wasn't outwardly sickly when he was a kid. His health
really started to deteriorate when he was 1 5 or 1 6. But he was more
aggressive than I was. But the last 1 5 years or so of his life were terrible.
It was just one thing after another. My mother said that I always protected
my brother. I do recall this. I even have dreams about this stuff from time
to time. But I didn't realize I was as protective of him as she said that I was.
Not that we didn't have our fights.
AUDREY: And do you think you were protective because he was your little
brother, or because he was ill?
DICK: I think it was both.
Page 90
AUDREY: Want to talk a little bit about your mom's cooking?
DICK: Well, it was both Irish and Italian. She was a good cook. I think
she learned from her sister, who also was married to an Italian guy. My
mother would cook ravioli, and malfatti was one of her favorite meals. She
had sort of a routine. One day of the week we would have one thing, and
another day another, and even though she didn't go to church anymore, we
always had fish on Friday. She was a very good baker and made good
desserts. Packed my lunch every day I went to school. Two or three
sandwiches, a couple of cupcakes, fruit, and so on.
AUDREY: Did she have friends?
DICK: She mixed a lot with her sisters. My father was more outgoing
than she was, and a lot of her good friends were people she met through
business acquaintances of my father's, particularly when my father's
business was in the house. There used to be a big social thing in the house in
the early days. She would entertain three or four times a week. It would
always be spontaneous. My father'd say, I'm bringing so-and-so home, or so-
and-so's going to eat with us. And she'd raise a little hell with him, but she
enjoyed it, too. One very close friend was Marie Ertola from around the
corner on Francisco Street.
AUDREY: And so they'd stay for dinner on the spur of the moment?
DICK: Exactly. And then it became a regular thing that when a couple
of wives of friends of ours had passed away, the husband would be a dinner
Page 9 1
guest at our house for a year or two until he found another lady. There were
several like that. And there was a teenage kid who used to work for my
father, who had dinner with us every single night. There was a lot of
entertaining going on all the time.
AUDREY: It wasn't necessarily formal, just "join the family" kind of thing?
DICK: Not formal at all. The closest thing to formal was that my
mother always used to have Christmas, and then there would be twenty or
twenty-five people, something like that. That was mostly her family. And
there were a lot of them!
My father was gregarious. He made friends easily, and all of a sudden they'd
be regular visitors. In those days the doorbell would ring and somebody would
pop in. There was no telephone call, and you weren't expecting them, but
they'd be welcome. If you were in the middle of dinner, you might say, give
us 1 5 minutes and we'll be with you. That's the way it was,
AUDREY: So people would just ring the doorbell and show up?
DICK: Just to say hello. Just in the neighborhood, or something like
that. I remember the Albrights - they did that many times. And neighbors.
We'd get close to a neighbor, and they would come. The young woman
psychiatrist next door to us, who was widowed at an early age, like in her 30s
somewhere. For a year or two, she ate dinner with us frequently. Mar
Follinsby was her name. I haven't seen her or thought of her for years.
AUDREY: How about World War II. What are your memories? You must
Page 92
have been just starting high school?
DICK: No, junior high school. In 1 941 I was probably in the 7th grade.
You know, my memories are that it was such a cohesive effort on the part of
everybody and that the whole society was completely dedicated to the war.
Every movie was loaded with propaganda. They collected tinfoil at school.
Peeled off the gum wrappers. Everything, you know. And I remember the
rationing.
AUDREY: Tell me about that.
DICK: Well, both in food and in gasoline. There were different ratings
of coupons for gasoline, and I think A was the best. That was priority. You
needed it for business or war work or something like that. We had a C and
could buy only a certain amount of gas. You could buy just a certain amount
of meat, too. A lot of stuff you couldn't get. It's funny how fuzzy this is in
my mind. I was 1 6 years old when the war ended, so I should have a better
recollection than I do.
AUDREY: Do you remember what the ration books looked like?
DICK: No. They had stamps for food rationing, as I recall.
AUDREY: What items were rationed?
DICK: Boy, that's a good question. I know you couldn't get rubber.
Getting a new tire was impossible. They were retread tires and were very
difficult to get. I don't recall.
Page 93
AUDREY: You did say meat was one of the foods in short supply.
DICK: Yes, definitely. I wasn't doing the shopping, so I don't recall how
it worked, but food was rationed and gasoline, certainly.
AUDREY: How did people get their ration books? Did they have to go pick
them up somewhere?
DICK: I don't recall. All the news, all the newspapers, all the radio news
was completely devoted to the war. Everybody knew families who had lost
kids. When I reflect on it, it makes me sad, [Pause. Tearful] They wanted
the young kids. They were cannon fodder. And they wouldn't try and dodge
it. They did what they were told.
AUDREY: Did you have friends who had older brothers?
DICK: Oh, sure. In fact, a guy who used to work for my father, one of
the delivery boys I told you about - he was killed. And sure, all my cousins
were in the service. The children of my mother's siblings. I remember VJ
Day very well. VJ Day was the end of the war with Japan.
I was on Market Street that night. A friend of mine got hit in the face and
his glasses broke in his eyes, and he had to be taken home. It was an
absolute riot, even though we knew it was coming. I remember when we
dropped the first bomb. I don't know whether it was Hiroshima or Nagasaki,
but I remember it scared the hell out of us, you know, talking about this little
bomb doing all of that damage. I was absolutely convinced society would not
Page 94
last for another 50 years. I was wrong. But as a kid I remember that very
well. I remember when Roosevelt died.
VJ Day was about six months after VE Day, the end of the war in Europe. Of
course, here on the Pacific Coast we were very involved in the Pacific
operations. I mean, the troops ail went through here on their way out.
AUDREY: So there was a big celebration on Market Street.
DICK: Oh, huge celebration on Market Street, and riots. Well,
everybody was turned loose and got drunk. They were breaking into the
liquor stores. It was a madhouse.
AUDREY: Just like the kinds of things that we have now. Nothing's new.
DICK: Oh, yes. And you know, reflecting on that, well, everything was
absolute propaganda. Even at that time I was astute enough to realize that a
lot of this was bullshit that we were being fed. Not to say that we weren't all
very patriotic and devoted to winning the war and so on. But a lot of our
education was slanted that way. Like in the gym classes, "Oh, we're
preparing you to be soldiers."
AUDREY: No, really?
DICK: When I say that, I mean they were always telling us, "When
you're in the Army, you're going to be thankful for this regime we're putting
you through." This was particularly at Marina Junior High when I was there,
and it was a good program. We were all in great shape. But I guess the
Page 95
general impression I have is that for those four or five years, everything
was just completely devoted to the war, and that's what everybody thought.
All the popular songs were war songs, you know, when I grew up.
AUDREY: Have any favorites?
DICK: Yes. "There will be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover . . ."
My kids spoof me about that. That's one of my favorite songs. But in the
beginning of the war there was much that was so crude. For example, the
first song I remember is "You're a Sap, Sap, Sap, Mr, Jap, to make the white
man angry." That came out like a day after Pearl Harbor.
AUDREY: I've never heard that one.
DICK: Well, you certainly wouldn't hear it now. You'd have to dig pretty
far to find it, but I do remember those lyrics,
AUDREY: And you mentioned that there was celebration after the dropping
of the atomic bomb.
DICK: No. VJ Day, yes, but not related to the dropping of the bomb.
There was a celebration when Japan surrendered.
AUDREY: But you also mentioned that there was this uneasy feeling about
this tiny little bomb . . .
DICK: Yeah, very much so. I remember talking about it to other people.
I mean, the devastation was unheard of. Sure, we had done the same thing in
Page 96
Berlin and in other places, but by conventional bombing. It took months and
months to wipe out a city like that. If you've seen the pictures of the raids
on Germany, you couldn't see the sky for the number of bombers that we
sent out. This was a concentrated program that went on and on. But my
God, we did the same thing in Japan with one bomb. Everybody was talking
about it. The war ended a week or so after that. I know I was uneasy about
the bomb, and my friends and I wondered about the consequences.
AUDREY: Do you remember air raid practice here In San Francisco?
DICK: I remember the first one. There's a cute story relative to that.
We had blackouts in San Francisco, and we had to turn out all the lights. This
was very early on in the war. And we were all sitting at the dinner table when
we had that. We were eating, and the meat was in the center of the table.
There was one piece of meat left. When we turned the lights on again, that
piece of meat was gone.
AUDREY: You took it!
DICK: I got it [laughs]. Yes, I do remember that. And I remember the
blackouts. We had blackout curtains, and we were sure San Francisco was
going to be bombed. Obviously it never was. Mr. Devereau was the air raid
warden on our block. They had helmets, you know. Devereau was around the
corner from us on Chestnut Street.
AUDREY: Did every block have a warden?
DICK: That's right. Sirens went off. We had to pull down the blackout
Page 97
shades and turn all the lights out. My aunt and uncle used to tell a story.
They were just married at that time, and they were someplace in downtown
San Francisco when one of these went off. They headed for a mortuary a
relative owned. And so they spent the blackout in the mortuary with all the
lights out. •
AUDREY: So when the sirens went off, did you know whether it was real or
If It was a practice?
DICK: I don't think they ever had a practice one unannounced. I doubt
very much that they would have done that. They would announce a couple
days in advance that they were going to test the sirens. But they never
purposefully set 'em off without having given prior warning.
AUDREY: Okay, so you knew when it was coming and people had to get off
the streets.
DICK: But that was just in the very beginning of the war. That didn't
occur much after that.
AUDREY: After they became comfortable with the fact it wasn't --
DICK: Yes, it was very unlikely that the Japanese were going to get
close enough to get us here.
AUDREY: And the air raid wardens, were they volunteers who had to
enforce whatever the rules were?
Page 98
DICK: Yes, theoretically, but all they would do is knock on your door and
say, "I see a light coming through such-and-such a place, and everybody
cooperated."
AUDREY: Tell me what it is you do now, here at your office. Your
business.
DICK: I do very little. They call me The Godfather. We are a motion
picture and video lab, but it's gone much more in the way of video. It's
difficult to explain to somebody who doesn't know the technology. But we do
scanning of motion pictures, we turn film into video, and we turn video into
film, with all kinds of new techniques that evolved over the years. It's much
more of an electronic business now than it is a chemical business, although
the processing of film is still the backbone of our business. We recently
have gotten very involved in restoration, and that still requires photographic
processes, although it also includes these other electronic processes that I
mentioned to you.
AUDREY: How did you keep up with the technology yourself? Do you have
your father's inventiveness and engineering skills?
DICK: No. I guess I've always given it a lot of thought and tried to
figure where the next step was. I mean, originally we processed only black
and white film, then color came out, and I figured we had to go into color.
Next, color negative came out, and I decided we had to go into color negative.
Then transfer from film to video. These were all major investments when we
did it. I was scared to death at that time, and I'm talking quite a while ago, it
was a half-million dollars just for a piece of equipment to transfer film to
Page 99
video. We got involved in that and got very good at it, and we do a lot of
that.
As an update, Monaco Labs has recently committed to digital motion picture
technology. We have made a substantial investment in setting up a digital
intermediate suite and as a matter of fact changed our name to Monaco
Digital Film Labs and Video.
You asked me what I do. Not much anymore. I come in for a couple of hours
a day. I kind of keep the peace around the place. I guess I am the "father
figure". Mostly I come in and fool around with my J.B. Monaco web site and
continue to develop the photographic collection for one more crack at
publishing another book which will probably never materialize. Then I go to
lunch!
AUDREY: Well, just to kind of draw a circle around this: the camera your
grandfather used to do the earthquake and fire pictures was relatively new
technology at the time. Field work. We talked about that in the first
interview.
DICK: That's right.
AUDREY: And your father went further -- getting involved in motion
pictures. The subsequent evolution of television was a particularly
opportune time for him since they were using 1 6-mm film on TV. And now
you've carried on the tradition of being at the cutting edge of photographic
technology with video and digital work.
Page 100
DICK: That's what you have to do to stay in business.
AUDREY: Is there anything before we close that you want to go back and
talk more about? Did I miss anything?
DICK: Not really. Well you told me earlier that you wanted to discuss
the prejudices of the northern Italians against the southern Italians and vice
versa. I reflected on it a little bit and came to the conclusion that I did not
hear much of it at home, probably because my mother was of Irish descent
and would not have known what they were talking about.
I did hear a fair amount of it as a kid growing up. Mostly from the northern
point of view. Richard Dillon described it in different terms. I think he called
it campanilismo, which literally translated means allegiance to the bell tower.
[Note: Richard Dillon is the author of North Beach - The Italian Heart of San
Francisco, which is illustrated exclusively with J.B. Monaco photographs.]
AUDREY: So it wasn't so much north/south rivalry as it was provincial --
"my town is better than your town" kind of thing?
DICK: Sure. But that is not to say that the north/south thing did not
exist in my time. The Genovese versus the Sicilians, for example. However, I
have heard very little of it around here in recent years.
You know, when my father married a Callahan, that was unheard of in those
days. Now my son is married to a Japanese woman. So society is one hell of
a lot more tolerant than it was 1 00 years ago.
Page 101
AUDREY: Is there anything better today than it was when you were growing
up? Have we learned anything?
DICK: Well, as I just said, some of the prejudices have disappeared.
There's a hell of a lot today that I don't like, but then I'm an old fart, and I
talk just like the previous generation did. Sure, there's a lot of stuff that
just bugs the hell out of me. When we walked in the other day and somebody
has etched graffiti into an expensive front door, that just burns me up like
you can't believe. In the old days it was a much smaller city, and that would
be a crime. You'd have cops out here looking at that and trying to put a stop
to it. They simply don't have the time now.
However, let me make one thing clear. Despite my complaining about a lot of
stuff that goes on, and particularly the difficulty of running a business in
San Francisco, this is still my City. I know that I have lived in Marin for some
forty years. As a matter of fact many of the kids I grew up with have been
either on the Peninsula or in Marin for most of their adult lives. However, my
affection for San Francisco has only grown.
I admit that when I speak of the City I am actually referring to the northern
end. Specifically North Beach, Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill and Fisherman's
Wharf. A lot of my friends in Marin have a problem with the changes that
have occurred over the past four decades and really don't venture into the
City often. I on the other hand look for any excuse to spend parts of five or
six days a week here. I guess I am still just a city boy at heart.
AUDREY: You have a very young grandson. From your life experience.
Page 102
Dick Monaco, 1999
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